Even if it does, are you resting your case on two disparate incidents?
Well, obviously that is somewhat questionable, right? If some group decided that “Good morning/afternoon/evening” constituted an endorsement of religion and threatened to sue, do you think the District would cave and order all of their employees to say “Hello” exclusively? Or would they defend, secure in the knowledge that the case would be quickly dismissed? If so, why won’t they do so in this case if “Merry Christmas” is so clearly legal?
I’ve been lurking on this thread since the beginning, but never bothered to add anything, since by the time I thought of it, it was added by someone else. At the risk of hyjacking this thread, I would ask Bricker, to clarify this point. ISTM that Bricker is arguing that, in this case, the reference to a religious holiday is not in opposition to the seperation of church and state, if the government sanctions it. This, to me, seems to be a contradiction of the concept of seperation. I.e. even though it is proximally legal (if that’s the term) to say “Merry Christmas” because it is a federal day of respite, it is ultimately illegal (again, if that’s the term) because it is a government sanction of a religon. IalsoSTM that the only way to remove this legal contradiction is with legal means.
But, then again, IANAL.
And on preview, I see that I am not the first person to bring up this subject. Back to lurking.
We don’t have seperation of Church and State. That’s a representation of the establishment clause that simply doesn’t exist.
I’d also like to ask the other posters here if anyone diagrees that groups and individuals are trying to remove or limit the clebration of Christmas in the governmental areas of the “public sphere”? I just don’t see the debate about that. Of course grouips and individuals are tyring to do it. **Bricker **or anyone else can dredge up plenty of examples of exactly that. Bricker isn’t arguing the rightness or wrongness of the action, just the existence of it. I can’t believe this thread has gone to 6 pages on that topic…
No doubt groups and individuals have and do try to remove or limit the celebration of Christmas in the governmental areas of the “public sphere”. But they are not trying to do away with Christmas altogether. If this is what you want to describe as something akin to a War on Christmas then case closed.
Bricker does not limit his OP to the governmental areas of the public sphere. He refers to discussion that “garnered some attention last year.” It’s not clear if he includes last year’s controversy over certain retailers use of Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas. Which is why I asked as much in post #21. I think Bricker is still refining the picture of the phenomenon he is seeing.
Of course, in some sense, that’s happening. Howeer, Christmas exists both as a secular and a religious holiday. As near as I can tell, there are very few examples of individuals trying to limit secular celebration of Christmas.
Daniel
I certainly believe that that is the case as a subset of a more rigorous application of the Establishment Clause with no special consideration of Christmas.
Opposition to prayer in schools, the Decalogue on walls of schools and courthouses, blatant attempts to insert Christianity into government symbols, and Nativity scenes on public squares are all part of the ongoing effort to reduce or eliminate government endorsement of religious themes. And given that groups such as the ACLU have fought for the rights of students and faculty to engage in religious activity on their own time when uninformed administrators have mistakenly tried to suppress those activities, I do not see Bricker’s issue of “threats of lawsuits” to hold water.
We have one (loose) group of people who wish to enforce the Establishment Clause by both preventing the government from endorsing religion and preventing the government from interfering with private religious activity. We also have a (very loose) scattering of individuals within government agencies who may have overreacted to their misunderstanding regarding different lawsuits to impose unnecessary rules, yet the presentation is that the idiotic failure to understand what the actual laws and court decisions have said (going both directions) is now presented as an assault on a single celebration through actual suits or intimidation.
I see no specific issue regarding Christmas except that Nativity scenes were more prevalent religious icons than Decalogues. Trying to focus the general discussion of the Establishment Clause on Christmas appears to me to be simply cherry picking.
Then, as soon as we start talking about retailers and TV stations, the whole “war” thing becomes silly, because we are now claiming that diverse groups carrying out separate actions are actually working in concert to achieve a goal, depsite the problems with identifying the actual goal.
It does for the purposes of this thread. The government may not support any particular religion above others, period. SOCAS is simply shorthand for the first clause of the First Amendment. The reasons for it are as sound as ever, no matter how they’ve been flouted in the past and even the present, and they’re still worth defending, don’t you think?
C’mon now. It would be pretty damned silly to want to discuss if something exists while refusing to discuss *why * it exists. I don’t think that demurral can be taken at face value, unfortunately.
As long as we’re all trying establish some definition of terms, given the refusal of the OP to do so forthrightly, that’s a natural consequence.
In rereading the first and tenth ammendments, I would ask the following question:
What legal aspect of the constitution states that town or state governments have to have a seperation? The only thing that I see in the first ammendment about a seperation is that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, and, in the tenth, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Why haven’t the lawyers for the town/state governments told the ACLU, “We’re not Congress. We are allowed to make a state religion. Go bugger off.” ? (or have they, and it got shot down?)
You need to read a history of the 14th Amendment and its interpretations over the last 140 or so years.
But the only examples given so far in the government run or sponsored areas of the “public sphere”.
From page 1 of this thread:
No. Those cases were typical examples of the genre.
Are you suggesting that these cases are not similar to others? That each case is sui generis? What?
And, whatever side the answer comes down on, should anything be done about it? I understand that that’s not the debate Bricker has asked for, but I need to say I fear that the conclusion that there is a “war on Christmas” will lead to the fallacious result that (Democrats are destroying the country/atheists are un-American/you need to vote out any official who won’t agree there’s a war on Christmas/pick your spin).
I don’t think there is a war on Christmas - go to church in December.
“Merry Christmas” is clearly legal. But “good morning,” is even MORE clearly legal. That is, anyone, even untrained, can grasp that a demand to eliminate “Good morning,” based on excessive religious entanglement is absurd. But eliminating “Merry Christmas” based on that concern is not self-evidently absurd, especially if there is no awareness of legal precedent.
Analogy: “In God We Trust,” on money. To the untrained ear, that’s just the kind of challenge that has merit. Of course, that challenge has already been made, and lost.
But the argument that certain aspects of Christmas when supported by public dollars violate the 1st has also been made, and won. That’s why they back off when threatened with lawsuits.
'k. Thanks. New I was misssing something (fairly) obvious.
He’s already withdrawn the “war” label, so I don’t think we’re debating that anymore:
So do you think a proper paraphrasing of the OP would be: Do people use the courts to limit or eliminate government participation in Christmas? I hardly think Bricker is that unprovocative with his Great Debate topics.*
[sub]* I don’t intend for provocative to be taken in any negative sense.[/sub]
Check out Incorporation (of the Bill of Rights)
Your cite says:
I am a hip American urbanite. I have said “Merry Christmas” this past December. On the other hand, I said it in a normal voice rather than shouting.
Your cite goes on to say that anyone in the Sacramento public school system is banned from using the word Christmas. To check this, I went to the website of the Sacramento Public Schools and searched for the word “Christmas”. I did not find any trace of any such policy. I did, however, find that the first three hits were for programs encouraging teachers to organize donations from their class for the purpose of buying food and Christmas presents for poor children. Is that the sort of evil secular activity that you Christians wish to eliminate from our public schools?
All in all, I would say that your reference’s credibility is not looking terribly good. Then again, when the only source that backs your claims is a tabloid, that sort of goes without saying.
If you stretch the definition of the word “limit” far enough, perhaps you can find examples of people trying to limit public sphere celebrations of Christmas. But I fail to see how any of the examples mentioned so far constitute an attempt to “remove” Christmas celebrations from the public sphere.