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âEat Yuletide, You Atheistic Bastard!â
 In 1984, the Supreme Court launched one of Americaâs worst traditions: Christmas Agonistes. This is the ritual where everyone goes batty about what to âdoâ about Christmas. The court invented it in a decision called Lynch vs. Donnelly, the upshot of which was that if someone is offended at a crÚche or Christmas tree at city hall, they can go whining to a judge about it.
| That raises the question of whether those of us who're offended by the bitching, moaning, and whining have any legal recourse. |
Just this week, the Capitol performed its own minor Christmas miracle of transubstantiation. At the beginning of the week, House Speaker Denny Hastert unveiled a "holiday tree." But a few days later, after some entirely predictable bah humbugs, he rechristened it a "Christmas" tree. (Similarly, when the city of Boston tried to unveil its official "Holiday tree," the premier of Nova Scotia, which had provided it as a gift, called it a nifty trick since, "when it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree.") These miracles arenât exactly up there with keeping lamp oil burning for eight days, never mind rising from the dead, but theyâre pretty good for government work.
Personally, I take no offense at the government unveiling a Christmas tree on the grounds of the âpeopleâs house.â Besides, a place that in love with pork is hardly kosher to begin with.
| I don't take any offense, either. Holidays and festivals in the Christmas season have been around for a couple thousand years now, and before that as Saturnalia and probably a half dozen other festivals. It's not a coincidence that Christmas and Hanukka fall at approximately the same time. The campaign against it focuses on its religious aspect, but it's actually a campaign to divorce the present from the past. I don't think it will be successful â the Soviets found they couldn't suppress Christmas, and ended up celebrating the new year in approximately the same manner. The Soviets are gone, except for Berkeley and a few similar places, and Christmas is back in Russia. |
Lamenting the war on Christmas has become something of a cottage industry for conservatives, just as lamenting the perfidious intrusion of Christianity on the public square is a grand source of fundraising and TV time for segments of the Left. Fox Newsâs John Gibson has even come out with a definitive brief on the war on Christmas aptly titled The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.
| That's because we're at the tipping point with the nonsense. The national patience is running out. We're still feeling Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life, and the disloyal opposition is trying to feed us Battleship Potemkin. When the grinches come out, We the People start thinking pitchforks and torches. |
And for some it does seem like Christmas is under siege. Not just Christmas, of course, but religious expression generally. Traditionalists of a certain bent are at a particular disadvantage because they have a handy label to define their morality: religion. And religion has a special status in our society. Secularists, misreading history, claim that the Constitution requires that wherever government and religion intersect, religion must vanish. This is terribly wrongheaded in my opinion, but weâve all heard those arguments before.
| Over and over, each and every Christmas season, year after year. The season of Good Will Toward Men is under assault by people with teeny tiny souls, too small to be seen with the naked eye, always assuming souls could be seen, of course. |
What I think secularists donât appreciate is how unfair this feels to religious people who believe that the secularists have, for all intents and purposes, a moral faith of their own. For example, back in the Dark Ages when John Ashcroft ruled with an iron fist, and decent people everywhere quaked at the prospect of borrowing Catcher in the Rye from the library lest they land in the gulag under the Patriot Act, Ashcroft was unable to ban a Gay Pride Month celebration at his own Department of Justice. I donât think that celebrating Gay Pride Month would lead to the end of civilization, but I donât think Christian Pride Month would either. And yet we all understand that Christian pride is a nonstarter on government premises.
| I'm a lot more uncomfortable with Gay Pride Month than I am with Christmas. What happened to Sluts' Pride Month? When did we start celebrating the things we may or may not do with our pants off with entire months? |
The idea that liberalism operates â or should operate â like a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, rites and customs, has a very old pedigree stretching from ancient Rome to such modern figures as August Comte, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Thurman Arnold, and up to the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty. Without wading out into those weeds, what I think secular liberals could work harder at understanding is that whether contemporary liberalism is a secular religion or not, for its non-adherents it might as well be one.
| I'm as secular as the next guy, but I still like Christmas. I like having time set aside for Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild. I'm usually pretty happy to see the Mannheim Steam Roller put away on December 26th, but that's because we've overdosed on it by then, enough so to last us through until the following November. |
Liberals use the state to impose their morality all the time, and they get away with it because their faith isnât called a religion. Yet conservatives should be wary of launching a backlash. Just as it is counterproductive for a secular liberal to take offense at a well-intentioned âMerry Christmas,â it doesnât help if a conservative says âMerry Christmasâ when he really means âEat yuletide, you atheistic bastard!â If youâre putting up a Christmas tree in order to tick off the ACLU, youâve really missed the point.
| Is it okay of I just feel a bit of snide self-satisfaction that they're cheezed, even while opening my presents and exuding good cheer? |
Of course, none of this would be problem if judges in Washington minded their business to begin with. But thatâs the real heresy for some liberals.
Posted by: Fred 2005-12-03 |
