American Thinker | by Jeannie DeAngelis | Dec. 24, 2009
This year, America is receiving a subliminal holiday message that Nativity scenes pose a more imminent threat than Gitmo detainees being tried on American soil. Regardless of personal Christmas traditions, most Americans agree that the Nativity visually represents the biblical story of Jesus’s birth. Thus, controversial crèche issues are not about Christmas, but Christianity.
Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said that “[t]he Bible is the cornerstone of liberty … Students’ perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.”
Who could have foreseen the First Amendment becoming a secular platform to warn public schoolchildren to leave angel-shaped butter cookies home from school under threat of being “boiled [in] pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through [the] heart”?
Christmas in America is in the process of being prohibited by a public school system that has zero compunction about striking Jell-O from the lunch menu to placate pork sensitivity in Islamic students. Forging the righteous battle to eradicate Christianity, the ACLU simultaneously fights to install ceremonial footbaths for Muslims in municipal restrooms and university campuses.
Yet if a Nativity scene is even partially on “public” property, it is promptly banned for infringing on the rights of affronted drivers passing by. What the monitors of political correctness seem to forget is that 96%, or “almost all Americans[,] celebrate Christmas.”
Nativity scenes are not the only offenders. Atheists and non-Christians have targeted for eradication any Christmas songs performed in public school holiday plays. In fact, in New Jersey, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Maplewood-South Orange school district’s ban on any Christmas music that mentions religion. A three-judge panel acquiesced to anti-Christmas demands contending that constitutional principles stipulate that public schools remain secular in order to maintain an “inclusive environment”…excluding students who celebrate Christmas.
The truth is that “the U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that public schools must ban the singing of religious Christmas carols or prohibit the distribution of candy canes or Christmas cards.”
The state of New Jersey is where children parodied the Christian spiritual “Jesus Loves the Little Children” while singing lyrics praising Barack Obama. Singing songs venerating mortal men indicates that gods are tolerated as long as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob isn’t mentioned. Based on song choice, it appears the Garden State would welcome Nativity scenes if Baby Jesus were replaced with a statuette of Obama and three figurines of Nancy, Harry, and Barney, portrayed as Wise Persons, stood alongside the crib.
Canceling the Charlie Brown Christmas Special for a presidential address was so traumatic that the anti-crèche, candy cane, and cookie campaign can be described only as Christmas genocide. A White House that celebrates Ramadan sanctioned putting the kibosh on the holiday spirit by planning an oxymoronic “non-religious Christmas.” According to Socialist Secretary Desiree Rogers, in order to promote a more “inclusive” holiday season, and in an effort to “reach out to other faiths,” the Obama’s voiced the preference to cancel the longtime tradition of displaying the Nativity scene in the East Room. “Yet in the end, tradition won out; the executive mansion is now decorated for the Christmas holiday, and the crèche is in its usual East Room spot.”
Eliminating depictions of biblical stories and characters does not go far enough for iconoclasts wishing to totally exterminate Christianity from American culture. Childhood memories embracing flavors, smells, and songs must be stamped out to fully purge even the most remote allusion to Christ. Every good heathen knows that peppermint candy canes and spray snow possess the power to jar Christmas memories and summon dangerous, offensive hymns like “Silent Night.”
One example of a public school “fighting the good fight of secular fundamentalist faith” is Cherry Creek Heritage Elementary School in Denver, Colorado. Heritage works hard to insulate the student body from detrimental recollections, religious symbolism, and all references to Christmas. This particular bastion of non-discrimination proudly boasts of “student-centered instruction in a warm, safe, and welcoming learning environment.”
The school website claims that “[c]hildren feel comfortable and motivated because they have many opportunities to question, investigate, learn from their experiences, discuss their learning and celebrate their success!” All true…unless learning experience includes a shoebox manger or cookies in the shape of Christmas bells. For safety purposes, when referring to school gatherings during the holidays, the school forbids the use of the word “Christmas party.” Wait until the academic geniuses realize that “holiday” is a compound word stemming from “holy” and “day.”
Educational wizards at Heritage Elementary School boast a quote citing Sidney Sugarman, misspelled Surgarman on the website, which says “Teach a child to think, not what to think.” Yet Heritage Elementary School “warned students, parents, and teachers that all forms of religious expression would not be tolerated.” The esteemed educators at Heritage are committed and focused to banning mistletoe and holly…so much so that misspelled quotes and pretense give insight into the school’s disparity between stated intent and discriminatory reality.
While secular religion is promoted in America, Christmas and Christianity are under assault. In the article “Secular religion: Its power and promise,” Don Vaughn-Foerster says that religion “also means devotion to that which is of ultimate importance, which is a larger category than only the spiritual or supernatural. That which is of ultimate importance also includes ideas, ethics, and aspirations. In this larger usage, to be religious is to pursue one’s ultimate concern.”
With missionary zeal, secularists in the public school system, as well as the highest offices of government, exclude the spiritual and exalt the humanistic. This Christmas, “[t]here’s no room for Jesus at the inn and don’t even think about placing Him in the manger.” The “concern and importance” of worshipers at the altar of godlessness is working to foster ideas, ethics, and aspirations that successfully scrub what is deemed archaic ritual from young, impressionable minds.
Secular religion has set up church in a godless government stretching from Cherry Creek, Colorado to the White House and disguising its nefarious ambitions as political correctness. Initially, it starts with banning references to Jesus’s birth. This is followed by legally incinerating Rudolph, wreaths, and red ribbon in a cultural crematorium whose ash is all that remains of Christmas.
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