Why do you persist in misrepresenting the Plano School District’s policies? Once again, the Plano School District did not impose a rule that forbade students from distributing religious-themed material at school. Their policy forbade students from handing out any nonschool-related materials. There was nothing singling out religious material. And students were expressly allowed to distribute said materials, including religious materials, from a central location, at school, provided for their convenience. From your own link:
They haven’t gone from ‘zero opportunities’ to ‘some opportunities’, they’ve gone from ‘some’ to ‘more’. Why you don’t seem to be getting that I have no idea. It seems to me, based on everything I’ve read about PISD, their policies, and how they’ve responded to the parents’ concerns, that they have bent over backwards to be as accomodating of all religions and all observances inclusively, as anyone should possibly expect. And it has consistently been the Christians who have threatened and/or pursued litigation to inject their religion into the schools. So where you get off complaining about the ACLU making inquiries or threatening legal action in certain cases, I have no idea. Looks like a double standard to me.
Now, I’m no attorney, so I don’t know what the current prevailing law is in Texas, but according to a suit brought before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in August 2003 regarding an elementary school student who had been prohibited from giving out pencils and candy containing religious messages, [
](https://secure.nsba.org/site/doc.asp?TRACKID=&DID=32888&CID=164) In January 2004, the Rutherford Institute petitioned the United States Supreme Court to challenge the Third Circuit’s ruling. I have no idea what the disposition or current status of their petition is, but it seems to me that it’s not unprecedented, at least in some jurisdictions, that students at the elementary school level, which is the level at issue in the Plano School District, be legally disallowed from passing out religious messages because it is considered proselytizing. And yet, even though that’s not what PISD was doing, you’re still bent out of shape about it.
The point is that the label “War on Christmas” is an improper label for the actions of the ACLU. To use your example in order to cite your opposition of the death penalty as an action you have taken in “The War Against Conservativism” I would have to ignore all of the other conservative values you support. In other words, while the outward evidence in this case might show that you are against conservativism looking at the complete body of evidence its clear that your motivations lie elsewhere. I can look at your other actions in support of conservativism and deduce that you have no issue with that movement.
In the case of the ACLU if you only look at the cases in which they are acting against Christmas in the public sphere then you might conclude that they are engaging in “The War Against Christmas.” However, if you look at their body of work you see that it includes cases of supporting Christmas. Its clear from the ACLU’s support of Christmas that they harbor no ill will towards Christmas and that the actions you cite have a motivation other than the ACLU being anti-Christmas. I can look at the ACLU’s track record and realize that these actions are not a “War on Christmas” rather actions towards some other purpose.
These actions by the ACLU can’t be used to show that they are engaged in a “War on Christmas” any more than I can cite your opposition to the death penalty to show that you are engaged in a “War on Conservativism”.
No, you are the one who is pretending that I did not refer to one of your examples. I did, in fact, refer directly to one of your cases, making this clear by my reference to the “town council”, the letter from the ACLU, and the subsequent lawsuit. And it also did prove my point, as stated.
Why you are attempting to declare that I was talking about one thing when it has been made quite clear that I was talking about another is beyond me.
Perhaps you could cite your evidence that the council in question intended to flout the law - a cite of their minutes, for instance, in which they make their intentions clear, or some other evidence that you are not mischaracterizing their case, as you are doing with mine.
My level of comfort is not really at issue here. If citing your own words back at you raises your level of discomfort, perhaps you ask why.
Since, of two examples, only one was followed by a lawsuit, and since that lawsuit was, indeed, legitimate, you needed to ignore the other one that it is unreasonable to interpret a letter as even exerting pressure. A letter that makes an inquiry is simply a letter that makes an inquiry. A letter that makes a claim of illegality may be considered an effort to exert pressure, but the mere sending of a letter of inquiry (which is how the letter was described in both cases) does not.
As you might expect, I disagree. Who can say how much money these people are or are not making as a result of eliminating mention of Christmas from their Christmas sales season (although I do notice that they seem to be having to roll out their ‘holiday’ decorations, gifts and toys earlier and earlier; in August of this year, IIRC), but it can’t be helping. I can’t imagine that they are selling more product as a result of removing mention of Christmas from their ads and stores, and they certainly run the risk of alienating customers and losing business by removing it.
One wonders also, given that this movement has been going on for five years, why it is that Lowes, Target and Ace Hardware have all backed off from it. Clearly it’s hurting them. (It’s amusing also how those of you on the other side blame all this on O’Reilly, etc. Many of us have simply become attuned to this sort of thing coming from the left and are quick to recognize it when it does.)
In my case, I first became aware of the Happy Holiday (or more accurately, the suppression of Merry Christmas) movement a couple of years ago when I began to notice pained expressions from employees at the stores where I shop whenever I said Merry Christmas. I then - subconsciously and without even thinking much about it - began to equate this with the removal of Christmas scenes and mention from public view on constitutional grounds and the overall thrust of the PC movement. I then noticed that libs all over the country were defending the substitution of HH for Merry Christmas (as well as the concomitant suppression of the latter), and so my suspicions were confirmed. O’Reilly, Hannity, etc, had nothing to do with it.
The hypocrisy lies in these merchants looking forward to a Christmas bonanza each year while at the same time trying to hide mention of it from the very people they’re counting on for customers. Everybody knows the reason for the shopping bonanza is Christmas, and it’s annoying as hell when their position seems to be “We want you to buy your Christmas gifts from us, but we’re gonna pretend it doesn’t exist, because after all, Christmas is anti-PC, you know!”
Diogenes, I know that’s a rhetorical question and I know that you probably already know the answer (and I know that you asked it a week ago) but I think it deserves an answer. I know that this post might get a litte to close to a rant for GD, at least in some peoples minds, but we’re supposed to be debating facts and I feel like stating some facts. (None of this is aimed at Diogenese, by the way.)
The Christian Persecution Complex is caused by right wing politics. The radical right in this country knows that they can’t win elections based on the real issues, so they raise these bogus social issues (War on Christmas, gays are destroying marriage, evil libruls want to addict your kids to lattes, etc.) to upset and distract people so they don’t think about the real issues. They pound on issues like “The War On Christmas”[sup]tm[/sup], and “Prayer In Schools”, and “Creationism”… oh excuse me, I mean “Intelligent Design” and make some Christians feel like they’re some kind of persecuted minority and that Republicans will protect them from those mean ol’ libruls.
It’s all well and good, and necessary, to point out the factual inconsistencies in the crap put forth by people like Bricker. But at some point we have to go beyond that, take the tiger by the tail, and call it what it is.
It’s politics, and it politics of the worst kind. It’s intended to mislead people into voting against they’re own interests. Bricker may be an active and knowing promulgator of this crap or he may really sincerely believe it. I don’t know for sure, but his arguments do often strike me as calculated and deliberately misleading.
This crap has brought our country to a very dangerous place and I’m sick of debating these people on the so-called facts they spread while carefully avoiding discussion of their obvious dishonest intent.
We need to start calling them on it and calling it what it is; right wing propaganda intended to shift this country’s political debate away from the real (and important) issues toward a bunch of meaningless time and energy wasting non-issues.
Do you have a single instance of anyone in retail management ever making a claim that can be considered similar to this? There is one blog report of a WalMart employee responding to a nasty e-mail with a claim that Christmas has pagan roots–following which WalMart purportedly fired the employee–but I’m having a hard time picturing the management of Wal*Mart or Sears sitting around trying to find the appropriate level of PC to endorse.
(In fact, I find it interesting that among all the horrendous tales of Christmas abuse out there, not one retail manager has leaked the dreadful memo detailing the assault on Christmas–it is all depicted as inferences by people who have no access to actual management decisions.)
They appear to have backed off from it due to bad publicity. The publicity was generated by the extreme Right. For the same reason, major sponsors of various religious TV programs have dropped out of sponsorship of several shows at the last minute because the Religious Right raised (generally false) accusations against the shows. Once the noise is out there, corporations simply do not want any association with it.
(Aside from Lowe’s, my reading has been that the accusations against Target and Ace were false, anyway. The companies made efforts to make noise about rthings they were already doing (or not doing) without any actual changes in policy.)
As to the five years: it appears to have taken the rabble rousers that long to actually find enough disparate (and often invented) incidents to catch the eye of the news media.
I realize that Bricker has backed away from the “war” concept, but do you believe that there is an unholy alliance of liberals and corporate magnates that is trying to destroy Christmas?
I’m glad that someone else noticed that Christmas completely disappeared from the scene last December. No decorations (except in August). No crowds in the malls. No parking problems. No Christmas music. No promotional sales, last minute shopping ideas, Christmas wrapping paper, stocking stuffers, Santa Clauses, live nativity scenes at the church, candlelight services, Papal blessings, piles of gifts on Christmas morning, or family gatherings.
I just assumed that it was my usual problems with memory.
That’s your take on it; my take is that they began to back off from it once the Christmas shopping public in general became aware of it and started to voice their disapproval.
Well, I can tell you first hand that the word Christmas appeared absolutely nowhere (apart from the card section, I suppose) at the Target store I was in. And a week or so before Christmas I got an Ace Hardware circular in the mail in which the word Christmas appeared nowhere.
But both were selling ‘Holiday Trees’. :rolleyes:
I am hard pressed to think of a more egregious example of PC nonsense than this. How idiotic would it sound if for some reason stores were to start advertising ‘Holiday Turkeys’ or ‘Holiday Fireworks’ (or, more likely these days, ‘Holiday Eggs’)?
It’s the same with Christmas!..Christmas happens to be the holiday that is responsible for all this shopping. It’s the reason people are buying trees and it’s the reason people are buying gifts. To try to neutralize its significance (and after all, that is the true motive) by repressing the use of its name looks just as stupid as the examples I listed above.
So it’s a two-pronged aggravation for strong believers, and a semantic aggravation for those whose objection isn’t primarily religious.
No, I think that it’s taken hold in much the same way that political correctness itself has taken hold: it appeals to ‘impassioned do-gooders’ who are perfectly willing to trample the rights of the majority in an effort to try to assure that no minority is offended; and to those who oppose Christianity itself for political reasons and would therefore like to see its influence in society negated to the greatest degree possible.
As far as corporate magnates and/or small store owners or managers are concerned, I think they probably feel the same way about it as the population in general, but are overly quick to cave to PC pressures. Then having done so, they are attempting to have their cake and eat it too by shilling for Christmas merchandise while at the same time trying to avoid mention of its name.
Straw man. I did not claim you could not have a valid point. I pointed out that it is odd that there is this great movement (even a conspiracy) that has overtaken so many retail vendors, yet there is not one internal memo (revealed by some honest whistle blower) identifying their nasty plans.
Perhaps they have fallen prey to some illness that makes them avoid the word Christmas or, perhaps, the nefarious memo will appear at a later date. However, as I pointed out in one of the threads in December, I was in retail–30 years ago–when many stores began emphasizing “holidays” over “Christmas” and I never once saw anything that indicated a desire on the part of management (or marketing) to do anything other than make the advertising as inclusive as possible.
Which store(s) changed its(their) policies without receiving bad publicity?
Ah! So it is simply a semantic game that is played by the political Right wing to try to make individual acts of courtesy look like plots against America, (because that is what +95% of claims about “Political Correctness” are).
What PC pressures? Where has a columnist, lawyer, lawmaker, comedian, or other “do gooder” complained about the word Christmas outside a governmental situation? Where is all this pressure (from, apparently, an infinitesimally tiny portion of the American public) being applied?
Straw man back atcha…You seem to be arguing that this ‘great movement or conspiracy’ can’t be proven to exist without a memo, yet you yourself attribute its genesis to have occurred five years ago. (Can you say, ‘Oops’?..Yeah, I thought that you could.)
In other words, you’re asking which stores that had given into PC b.s. decided that they were shooting themselves in the foot by doing so and reverted to the way they’d done business all along? Well, I’d say Lowe’s, Target and Ace Hardware, to name a few.
No, its a semantic game played under the guise of courtesy (although certainly some of its proponents are honestly concerned about offense; Zoe comes to mind here) in order to marginalize Christianity and its influence, which a large segment of the left regards as being antithetical to their idea of life as it should be.
Who knows how these kinds of things take hold? Certainly not I. It comes from the same place that political correctness, Hollywood liberalism and press bias come from, I suppose. A tiny acorn of liberalism sprouts somewhere…takes root…and by some process mysterious to me, becomes (or tries to become) a mighty oak. I can’t point to the genesis of this glass of wine in front of me, nonetheless I’m reasonably certain that it’s there. And, as is the case with this glass of wine, the fact that I can’t trace it to its origin in no way means that it doesn’t exist.
As politely as possible: bullshit. I have not argued that any internal evidence is required in order to prove some great conspiracy. I have noted that it seems strange that if there is (as Medved, Hobson, O’Reilly, Falwell, and others have asserted), a conspiracy involving the whole liberal establishment and nearly every major retailer in the country over a period of several years, not one of the thousands of persons who had to have been involved has reacted in horror to the scheme and provided documentation revealing some portion of it.
Now, if one takes the position toward which Bricker seems to have moved that there is a discernible phenomenon (of, as yet, undetermined origin), then we do not need a conspiracy and we do not need evidence of the conspiracy.
I have simply raised the question with you (who had seemed to hold closer to the conspiracy position), whether you have any actual evidence.
Yet each of them changed their positions after receiving bad publicity (my point) and not before then (your claim). Which store changed their policy without the threat (or reality) of bad publicity?
After initially vetting the project and figuring that it would be a good way to appeal to the wholesome family crowd, (and actually providing some seed money for the production), GM fled into the night rather than sponsor the TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth after a few loons (including Falwell) raised hell with false accusations regarding the story line. (After the show was aired, a few of the more honest members of the Religious Right admitted that their claims had been in error.) With no evidence that any retailer has changed their policies on their own, there is a clear parallel that it would seem that their changes have much more to do with loud pressure tactics from the extreme Right than with any recognition that they did something wrong, to begin with.
I generally give you more credit than that. Without knowing every step of the process, I am fairly sure that you can figure that someone actually cultivates grapes and then either renders those grapes into juice or sells them to someone who will do that, then promotes its fermentation, bottles the stuff, contracts with various distributors and gets the product placed on retail shelves for you to purchase. I would even expect that you would have the intelligence to figure out from looking at the bottle’s label where to go to discover just who the players were in that cultivation to distribution process. The fact that you seem to be unable or unwilling to do the same regarding a matter that it appears you consider worthy of great consternation (to say nothing of anger and angst) suggests that you are more interested in cherishing an unsupportable belief than in discovering whether your belief has any substance.
I really don’t see what the uproar is. Christmas is celebrated by some people. Hanukah is celebrated by some. We heathens give gifts and sorta call it christmas with a lower-case “c”, but really it’s a holiday. Like the European term for “vacation.” Why would anyone get their knickers in a twist over what another person chooses to call it? Would you be offended if a Jewish shop owner put a “BLOW OUT HANUKAH SALE THIS WEEKEND!” banner in his window?
I’ve never seen a more self-righteous bunch of people than the ones who are pissed off about this. OF COURSE a shop owner is going to try to include everyone, even knowing full well that the brunt of the booty is coming from people who celebrate christmas (lower-case “c” intentional here). If you know you have a mixed audience, why NOT choose to be all-inclusive? You’d be an idiot not to!
The thing is, I’ve never asserted any such conspiracy. To me, it’s simply a movement that has come into being in some way that I’m at a loss to explain. Similarly, how does fashion take root? Why does something become fashionable, and who starts it? Who’s really behind it? I don’t know; it just happens. This is how I view the fact that the ‘war on Christmas’ has come into being. I’ve never asserted anything like you describe above for the simple reason that I don’t believe it.
It amuses me how you guys seem to think that every conservative poster must get his views and/or opinions from the likes of Falwell, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. I never watch Falwell; I probably don’t watch forty-five minutes of O’Reilly in a month; and the only time I’m likely to see Hannity is while flipping channels.
But if one is politically attuned, as I am, it really isn’t difficult to spot these kinds of things. And when I do I’m likely to respond to them with harsh disapproval…you know…just like O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. But the fact that I may share an opinion with these guys (and maybe share their anger and disdain) doesn’t mean I got my opinion from them.
This is exactly my position, toward which I have not ‘moved’. (Ah, such tricky verbiage thou doest spout!..I must be ever vigilant to prevent my position being moved out from under me.)
I don’t know how it is that I ‘seem’ to you to hold so many positions that I don’t hold in actuality, but there you are.
As I said in my previous post, I view this movement more as one that has taken hold because a sufficient number of like-minded individuals decided for a variety of reasons to adopt and promote it…pretty much like liberalism itself, don’t you think…rather than it being the result of backroom skullduggery on the part of certain specific individuals.
You say bad publicity; I say elucidation. The public at large began to learn – through the process of having it brought into the light of day – that a movement was afoot to suppress the use of Merry Christmas and to replace it with the holiday-neutral euphemism, Happy Holidays. Given that the left (in general; please spare me the example of some Christian who has no problem with it) views Christianity (read the religious right in the minds of many) negatively in the main, it isn’t much of a stretch to ascertain the motives behind it…and once enough people became incensed over it a backlash began which you regard as bad publicity, but which is in reality nothing more than irritation at the attempt, and an insistence that things remain as they had always been, which is to advertise Christmas mercandise as such, and to wish people a Merry Christmas without getting dirty looks from the PC Police.
Your side is the one instigating change. You can hardly claim our desire to hold with previously accepted and perfectly logical norms as being reactionary.
You’re most gracious.
Thank you for the wonderful example of the disconnect we appear to have here. You appeared to be wanting to know (demanding, actually) exactly when and where and how this movement is alleged to have come into being – with the belief implicit in your demands that if I couldn’t provide this documentation, my assertion was invalid. Regarding the wine analogy, I am saying that there is no way I can provide a step-by-step progression – given that the winemaker’s art dates back ten thousand years or better – as to how the wine before me first came into being, and that the fact that I can’t point to its genesis and subsequent provenance in no way negates the fact that still it sits here before me, as obvious as the nose on your face.
No, it suggests that you’ve asked an unanswerable question and that you are counting upon the resulting lack of an answer to allow you to assert that my claim of this movement’s existence – which you have inexplicably denied exists while simultaneously dating its emergence from five years ago – is invalid.
Because advertising Christmas merchandise does not in any way prevent people who want to buy gifts for some other holiday from doing so. Do you really think that someone of the Jewish faith who wants to buy someone a watch from Target as a Hanukkah gift is going to decline to do so because Target is advertising a Christmas sale? To me, this toothless argument plays a large role in exposing the true motives of the anti-Christmas crowd (and the merchants who feel compelled to kowtow to it) because it’s such a non-issue. I can’t imagine any merchant who knows anything about what he’s doing fretting over the business he’s going to lose to people of other faiths should he advertise Christmas merchandise. It simply isn’t gonna happen.
I’ve known many Jewish people over the course of my working life (as well as a Muslim family from Morocco who happened to be here over Christmas visiting their daughter who was a student here and a neighbor) and believe me, come Christmas time they hit the malls as hard and as cheerfully as anyone. It isn’t a problem except in the minds of those who want to use it as a false front in their efforts to marginalize and minimize Christianity and its influence upon society.
Any effort to put christianity in its place is ok in my book. christmas…it’s not just for christians anymore. The day was never “owned” by them in the first place and it’s high time society let them know it. Setting it off as something exclusive to christians is “feeding the trolls” as far as I’m concerned. It’s the principle.
