A Season for a bit of Reason?

The fine folks at Balloon Juice have been on top of battlefield reports from The War on Christmas. Apparently Focus on the Family has a Web site where shoppers can rate various stores as Christmas-Friendly, Christmas-Negligent or Christmas-Offensive. Readers are encouraged to consider these ratings heavily in deciding where to buy Christmas gifts. Story here: http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=30783

I think I know why this “War on Christmas” nonsense bothers me so profoundly, why I get so appalled at people who go apoplectic because Borders says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” I used to simply conclude that these people never stopped and took a second to think how those greetings would sound to people on the other side, people of other faiths. To most of us, “Happy Holidays” is just a way to be inclusive of everybody, at a time when people of from smaller communities of faith often feel especially marginalized. In other words, it’s just a form of politeness to strangers.

But as I read this Web site, the comments on it, and other sites like it, I realize this isn’t a simple case of failing to consider the other person’s perspective—something we’re all guilty of from time to time. These people are outright hostile to other people’s viewpoint. Maybe it’s gotten more pronounced in this day of polarized Tea Party politics, or maybe it was always there and I simply gave people too much credit.

For instance, Best Buy is listed as one of the most “Christmas-Offensive” stores, mostly because people found it offensive that Best Buy printed an ad wishing people a happy Eid al-Adha. (A bit of cultural instruction: the Muslim calendar and Jewish calendar are both lunar, but the Jewish calendar has leap months; as such, Hanukah moves around slightly on the Gregorian calendar, but is always fairly close to Christmas. The Muslim calendar has no leap months, which means Muslim holiday gradually cycle around our calendar, sometimes falling in the winter and sometimes not. This year, Eid al-Adha fell from Nov. 27 to 30.)

Again, this strikes me as just an inclusive thing to do. Focus on the Family’s secret shoppers found it actively offensive. Many complained that Best Buy ran no such Merry Christmas ad, probably because they were too ignorant to realize that the Eid al-Adha ad ran during the festival itself whereas Christmas was almost a month away, and that the Merry Christmas ad will probably come near Christmas, not four weeks before. (And then when it comes, the loons will declare holy victory. That’s how the game is played.)

Like I said, these people seem actively hostile to the perspectives of Those People. That’s much more profound than mere self-centeredness. Actively resenting people for having different beliefs is a way to striking at one of the most fundamental rights of all: the legitimacy of their presence among us. Resentment of common courtesy to people who are different pretty strongly implies resentment of their right to be here. Jesus himself said that those who look with hatred on another person have committed murder in their hearts. In much the same vein, those who wish that all Those People would just move away have committed an odious form of segregation in their hearts. That’s a really awful thing if you think about it, and that’s why I find this Warmongering on Christmas so toxic.

Pressuring stores into denying the existence of other holidays is asking them to pretend as if the people celebrating them don’t exist. For we Christians, the birth of Christ is the reason why we feel so merry during Christmastime. But there’s a movement out there using this “reason for the season” rhetoric to assert that if you celebrate some other holiday this time of year, you have no right to be merry or happy about it. That’s not the reason for the season—stopping trying to be festive, that’s just for us. That’s a very vengeful thing to seek to de-legitimize right to religious freedom in that way.

Certainly this doesn’t impugn anyone who likes to hear people wish them a Merry Christmas. I love Christmas, and I love when people wish me a Merry Christmas. But when a retailer wishes me Happy Holidays, it would never occur to me to feel offended. They’re there to serve everyone, and that’s a way to be uplifting to everyone. So I appreciate their kindness.

As one last bit of cultural instruction, there’s a further irony here: Eid al-Adha celebrates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son in obedience to God—an event equally venerated by Christians. So I feel very comfortable continuing to shop at Best Buy.

Merry Christmas to me, and Happy Holidays to all.

And Corduroy Skirts Will Be Outlawed!

Hopefully I'll be able to blog regularly again with the respite from teaching...

I have little patience with sociopathic liars. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’ve become increasingly concerned lately with the success of gay rights legislation—because the people on C Street in D.C. lobbying against them are such dishonest bastards. And anything that politically marginalizes sociopathic, dishonest lying bastards is probably healthy for the Republic in the long-term.

A few years ago, I got a chain e-mail describing the horrors that would be inflicted upon our nation if Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Aside from God’s furious wrath, the e-mail breathlessly promised that the law would make it a federal crime to read certain anti-homosexuality passages of the Bible. It invoked images of pastors being led away in handcuffs for preaching the Gospel.

So, being the good lawyer that I am, I read the bill. It of course said nothing of the sort. It said nothing that could even be remotely construed as doing anything sort of like that. The only logical conclusion, then, was that the authors of the e-mail consciously and deliberately lied to their readers in order to marshal opposition to the bill.

That bill eventually passed. It is now the law of the land. And yet there have been zero instances of preachers being hauled off in squad cars—because that’s completely unrelated to the actual law. The conservative apparatus that pushed that lie has been proven, by actual events, to be completely and demonstrably wrong.

What the bill does, by the way, is enforce the Equal Protection Clause by allowing U.S. attorneys to prosecute crimes (murder, assault, rape, arson, etc.) if evidence suggests those crimes were motivated by prejudice against the victim’s sexual orientation. Federal prosecutors have long had that prerogative in cases of crimes motivated by racial, sexual, religious or ethnic prejudice. This ensures that local authorities cannot subvert one of the bedrock principles of law and order: that no matter who you are, if people physically assault you, the state will prosecute them to the full extent of the law.

If you truly know what the law does, then in order to be against it, you basically have to argue that people who physically assault homosexuals should be able to get away with it, or at least get off lightly. Most people find that idea repulsive. Hence, people who oppose the law on its merits went to great lengths to confuse people about the law’s real purpose.

Americans also tend to be overwhelmingly against job discrimination. Even people who don’t disagree with homosexuality as a lifestyle frequently believe that no one should be fired from their job because of their personal life. There happens to also be a bill in Congress that would make it illegal “to fire, refuse to hire, or fail to promote employees simply based on sexual orientation.” Again, this is a protection already extended to every American in regards to their race, ethnicity, gender and religion. And once people understand that that’s all this bill would do, the majority tends to support it.

So anti-gay-rights lobbyists are engaged in the same strategies of deception about this bill. The Family Research Council sent out a letter to its members warning against such nonsense as the law leading to an “employer telling you to remove the Bible from your desk because it is offensive to the homosexual or cross-dresser he was forced to hire.” They also claim that religious organizations would be forced to hire non-discriminatorily, even though those are explicitly exempted from the bill. Think Progress has the story. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/01/frc-impose-homosexuality/

To reiterate: They are lying. There may be more polite words for it, but not more descriptive words.

I hope the bill passes, and not just because I oppose job discrimination. If the bill becomes law, employees will be protected, but none of this hooey about the government cleaning up Bibles from desks will ever come to pass, and these organizations will once again be shown, in real time, to be flatly wrong. I’d like to think that if they’re proven totally wrong enough times, people will start to notice their dubious credibility.