Over the years, we have gotten used to the American Civil Liberties Union launching legalistic jihads against recognitions of Christmas, in between coming to the rescue of murderers and terrorists.
The ACLU invokes that famous phrase about a "wall of separation between church and state" -- a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution but somehow considered to be part of Constitutional law.
The Constitution forbad Congress from creating "an establishment of religion" but this was no mysterious concept known only to deep thinking legal scholars.
The people who wrote the Constitution all knew exactly what an establishment of religion was because they had all lived under one -- the established Church of England.
Being established meant that everyone had to pay taxes to support that church, whether they belonged to it or not, and that people who didn't belong to the established church could not be admitted to various institutions or be appointed to certain official positions.
This had nothing to do with Christmas, merry or otherwise.
It is one of the sad signs of our times that we allow the ACLU to bamboozle us, or bully us with lawsuits, over something for which no one ever passed a law.
Both sides of this argument have been raging in recent years; and this year in particular the fighting has been fierce. I only began to get annoyed in the last ten years or so, when the excuse that was always given--by schools, by the Girl Scouts, by just about every institution that I questioned about it--that the reason they could not sing traditional Christmas Carols; could not have a decorated tree; could not call it Christmas vacation; could not risk the possibility however remote, of offending someone; was that they were afraid of getting sued.
And it wasn't even that they thought they would lose the lawsuit if one was brought. It was that the expense of merely fighting a lawsuit was more than they could handle financially.
In other words, just as Sowell says, we have been bamboozled and bullied into "politically correct" thinking about Christmas. The ACLU has slowly evolved from an organization that used to be concerned with issues of real freedom and real oppression--into just another schoolyard bully who flexes his muscles and expects everyone around to obey his every wish--or else.
Those of us who have allowed ourselves to be bullied by the ACLU, must also take some responsibility for the situation. The first time we started being blackmailed and pushed around by the litiginous hooligans whose secular beliefs are as equal as anyone else's--but not more equal--we became just like kids who, when threatened, allow a bully to steal their lunch money on a regular basis instead of fighting back.
I am glad to see we are finally standing up to the bullies in our society.
No comments:
Post a Comment