Post-Christmas Cheer
By: Administrative Account | Source: Marilyn Brannan - IRN Staff Commentary
December 30, 2003 5:39PM EST
Post-Christmas Cheer
By Marilyn M. Brannan, Assoc. Editor
Unravelling The New World Order
December 29, 2003
John Leo observed in a Town Hall column on the Internet just before Christmas that things are not going well for the Grinches. It seems the anti-Grinch forces have been developing some legal muscle.
In the bad old days, when a lawyer from the ACLU would show up to intimidate some tiny school board over a religious freedom issue (frequently at Christmas), the high legal costs to fight the ACLU would often force the board to cave in.
Now, there are organizations trained to fight the Grinches. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), for one, has a fighting force of 700 lawyers trained to combat assaults on our liberties around the country. Others that we are aware of who have joined the battle are the Thomas More Law Center, The Liberty Legal Institute, and the Catholic League. Following are a few examples that may add a little “post-Christmas cheer” for God-fearing Americans who are sick and tired of the annual battle by the secularists, atheists, and others with an anti-Christian agenda to do away with Christmas.
- In New Jersey, the Hanover Township school district was considering a ban on Christmas carols and other religious music at school concerts. When parents, backed by the ADF (www.alliancedefensefund.org), protested and threatened to sue, the school board beat a retreat, stating, “If a school wants religious music, they can have it, the way they could before.”
- In Elbert County, Colorado, a charter school was being pressured to ban religious songs from its holiday concert. Even though the school’s program included Hanukkah songs and secular music along with Christmas carols, the Anti-Defamation League claimed the school’s program was “harming the sense of well-being” of Jewish students. ADF blocked the effort to ban the traditional Christian carols.
- In Plano, Texas, one school district refused to allow a third-grader at a class party to hand out candy canes with a religious message attached. The ADF, aided by the Liberty Legal Institute (www.libertylegal.org) intervened, arguing that “public schools are not zones of religious censorship.”
- At Central Michigan University, the affirmative action office put out a “warning” regarding campus celebrations of Christmas, advising that Christmas “may be offensive to others within a place of employment.” Of course, no such warning was issued about the potential offenses of celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Las Posadas. The Catholic League alerted Fox News Channel; and on the same day that Fox decided to do a story on this, the warning to Christians at CMU was withdrawn.
- The Catholic League intervened in another incident in which the Meriden Public Library in Meriden, Connecticut, decided to ban portraits of Jesus from an artist’s exhibition. William Donohue sent a letter to the executive director of the American Library Association in Chicago, requesting an end to any future grants to the library. Shortly after, the Meriden library board of directors voted unanimously to allow the artist to display her paintings of Jesus.
The Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan (www.thomasmore.org) has brought suit in one particularly insulting case in which the New York City public school system refuses to back down from its policy that allows the display of the Islamic star and crescent and the Jewish menorah, but stubbornly refuses to allow the display of Christian religious symbols such as a Nativity.
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The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a bipartisan and interfaith public interest law firm that protects the free expression of all religious traditions, responded to the intransigence of the NYC public school system by awarding it the 2003 “Ebenezer Award,” an undistinguished “honor” given to the individual or group responsible for the most ridiculous affront to the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays. The “award” is a specially designed Christmas stocking filled with lumps of coal.
Becket Fund President Kevin J. Hasson commented recently that New York City school officials have managed to insult just about everybody with their policy. “They doubly insult Christians, both by banning a creche in the first place, and by arguing, in federal court documents, that the depiction of the birth of Christ does not represent [an] historical event,” Hasson said. “They insult Jews by deciding that the only way to allow display of a Menorah is to define it as a ‘secular’ symbol. And just for good measure, they insult Muslims by putting the star and crescent into the same ‘secular’ category. It's not often that public officials come up with a way to insult every major monotheistic religious tradition in America in a single policy declaration, but the endlessly creative bureaucrats at the New York City public school system have pulled it off.”
“What can I do?”
Back in September, Dennis Prager, acclaimed radio and television host, writer, lecturer, and teacher, answered a question that he is often asked: “What can I, a simple citizen, do to make our country better?”
His answer: “Rename your company’s ‘holiday’ party a Christmas party. If your effort is successful, it will send shockwaves through the country. . . . Do not be intimidated by anti-Christian animosity that masquerades as ‘sensitivity’ or ‘inclusiveness.’ And when someone asks you whose idea it was, tell them it came from a Jew who doesn’t observe Christmas, but who loves and honors the fact that the vast majority of his fellow Americans do.” (“Taking back our country—one way to begin,” TownHall.com, Sept. 16, 2003)
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Readers may also be encouraged to know there is a website that chides well-known retail stores for abandoning the word Christmas in favor of “holiday.” The site, www.GrinchList.com, is run by a Virginia couple, Kirk and Amy McElwain. Some of “Christmas-averse” stores they list include Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, the Discovery Store, KB Toys, and Home Depot. Companies they have commended for not censoring the word Christmas include DisneyStore.com, JC Penney, Rite Aid, Sears, Toys “R” Us, and Wal-Mart.
One last word of wisdom from Mr. Prager. He writes, “I was raised to believe that unless the majority is engaged in evil, one honors the majority’s will. If a religious, racial or atheist minority member can’t abide the name “Christmas,” it is entirely his or her problem, not the majority’s. Demanding that the vast majority of one’s fellow workers deny the holiday they all celebrate just to make a few people more comfortable is morally indefensible.”
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