Merry Christmas, dammit.
One has to wonder what the Prince of Peace would think of one of his disciples saying something like this:
The Christians are coming to retake their place in the public square, and the most natural battleground in this war is Christmas. [ John Gibson, quoted in Salon ]
The idea of turning the Spirit of Christmas into a cultural warrior frankly turns my stomach, as it should to any Christian who wants to keep the season holy.
That article, by the way, is pretty interesting. Michelle Goldberg suggests something that I’ve suspected, and not just about Christmas. Much of the silliness over religious holidays that the right-wing likes to go on about is hysteria caused by right-wing lawyer fear-mongering. People clamp down inappropriately on religious speech because they hear that you can get in trouble for it, not because anyone has actually gotten in trouble for it.
“You have a dynamic here, where you have the Christian right hysterically overrepresenting the problem, and then anecdotally you have some towns where lawyers restrict any kind of display or representation of religion, which is equally absurd,” says Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates and one of the foremost experts on the religious right. “It’s a closed loop. In that dynamic, neither the secular humanists or the ACLU are playing a role.”
Contrary to the characterization of the ACLU by right-wing organizations, the ACLU does not oppose religion. They oppose the imposition of religion by state authority. The ACLU affirms and actively defends students rights to religious practice. The inability of many to recognize this fact borders on willful mendacity.
A few cowardly administrators scared into canceling Christmas activities by right-wing myths of hordes of anti-Christian lawyers do not a conspiracy against Christians make. And as Steve Benen points out:
Last year, armed police broke up a Christmas Mass at an underground Catholic church in eastern China, arresting the priest, demolishing a makeshift pulpit and scattering two thousand worshipers. Around the same time, some seasonal temp at the mall wished Bill O’Reilly a generic “Happy Holidays” and he felt like a victim. [ Political Animal ]
