FACES AND PLACES: The war on Christmas (12/15/02)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

The war on Christmas

It's that time of year again. As most of us celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ and the ideals of "Peace on Earth ... Good Will Toward Men," a segment of the irate left is working hard to reduce the significance of this 2,000-year-old miracle and the message of hope it offers the world.

While some of our priests worry about "taking Christ out of Christmas," a well-organized, well-financed, godless minority wants to take Christ out of the public mind. And they're succeeding, especially with our children. When I started teaching elementary school in inner-city Chicago during the 1950s, we sang Christmas carols and produced Christmas pageants and programs with the complete panoply of Christ child, three kings, and shepherds. We wished our children "Merry Christmas" as they left for the "Christmas break."

By the 1990s in the DeKalb school system, "Silent Night" was out, "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" and "Frosty the Snowman" were in. Christmas programs were replaced by "winter programs," Christmas vacations were replaced by "winter breaks," and a generic "happy holidays" replaced "Merry Christmas."

Christmas in America continues to be devalued. In an article that appeared in last December's issue of Chronicles, published by the Rockford Institute, Tom Piatak suggests that our nation is not only at war with terrorists but with Christmas as well. "In order to avoid giving offense to anyone anywhere," he wrote, "millions of Americans are now seemingly content to keep quiet about the holiday they do celebrate and to act as if all sorts of other minor festivals - Kwanzaa, Hannukah, Bodhi Day, Ramadan, the winter solstice - are equally important."

Thanks to muddled, multicultural miscreants, we are reticent today to mention our Judeo-Christian tradition, or, for that matter, our debt to Western civilization. All cultures and faiths are equal, we are told, and to publicly celebrate one is to disrespect all others. In a column that appeared in January 2001, Samuel Francis cited a report in The New York Times which mentioned that New York's "newest wave of immigrants, for whom Christmas is often an alien and mystifying religion, have ... ignored what is inconvenient to fashion a palatable Christmas." For some cultures, I suppose, "peace on earth and good will toward men" can seem alien and mystifying indeed, especially when some sanction conversion by the sword and death to infidels.

Christmas, wrote Mr. Piatak, "has been the principal holiday of the world's most creative civilization for over a millennium. It has inspired a profusion of art, architecture, literature and music: a love of Christmas can lead to a deeper love of our whole civilization. Giotto never painted a Kwanzaa scene. Bach did not write a Hannukah oratorio, and Dickens did not pen a 'Ramadan Carol.' And no one comparable to them did either."

Never mind all that. Today, even "The Christmas Carol" is considered dangerous in a New Jersey middle school where school officials recently cancelled an outing to see the play because some children might feel "awkward." Last year, according to Catalyst, a publication of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, red poinsettias were banned in Ramsey County, Minn., government buildings, and Christmas cards were banned in Frederick County, Md., schools.

Even clothing can be deemed dangerous. According to a column by John Sullivan, two middle school students in Rochester, Minn., were disciplined last year for wearing red and green scarves in a Christmas skit and for ending the skit with "We hope you all have a Merry Christmas"; two ninth-graders in Plymouth, Mass., were told they could not create cards that say "Merry Christmas or depict a nativity scene; the county school board in Covington, Ga., deleted the word Christmas from the school calendar after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened legal action."

The ACLU has been in the forefront of the battle to diminish Christmas. Notorious for its extreme secular bias, the ACLU has in recent years sought to: deny tax-exempt status to all churches and synagogues; terminate all military and prison chaplains; halt government funding to religious foster-care programs; prohibit Bible reading in public schools during after school programs; prohibit census questions about religious affiliation; purge the words "In God We Trust" from our coins; and eliminate "under God" from our 'Pledge of Allegiance' ... all in the name of the First Amendment prohibition regarding the "establishment of religion." Never mind that the same amendment protects the "free exercise" of religion.

One need only examine the origins of the ACLU to understand its commitment to a godless society. Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU in 1920, was an unabashed Stalinist. According to an article in the December 1988 issue of Conservative Digest, Mr. Baldwin was a contributor to Soviet Russia Today, an English-language propaganda rag funded by Moscow. In 1934, during the Great Famine in Ukraine, Mr. Baldwin wrote that he advocated a class position that "is anti-capitalist and pro-revolutionary ... When the power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever ..."

In a letter published in The Nation on January 23, 1935, Mr. Baldwin declared that he could support "the Soviet dictatorship ... I do so because, though I oppose dictatorship in principle, the Soviet Union has already achieved economic liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world."

The original ACLU board also included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Z. Foster, two other Stalinists who became high-ranking members of the Communist Party, USA. Although the ACLU never supported communism openly, its anti-religion posture suggests a close affinity.

We Ukrainian Christians are a people of hope. We have seen the light. Christianity has sustained the Ukrainian people through the worst terrors of the 20th century, horrors that no other people suffered. How tragic it would be if in America, the freest nation in the world, the denizens of darkness and their demented deconstructionist brigades were eventually able to deny us our constitutionally protected right of religious expression. It's time to join the rising army of Christians outraged by the power wielded by a small, non-representative, mandarin minority of moral midgets.

Let us become Christian giants. Let us joyfully and openly celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace. Let's spread the Good News He brings to the world. Khrystos Razhdayetsia!

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected].

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