Ah, Go Roast Some Chestnuts, You Friggin' Losers

My good friends the Minister of War and Johnny Red are perturbed by this story...

The latest salvo in the "war on Christmas" has been fired — this time over the lyrics to the venerable Christmas carol "Silent Night."

Many who believe Christmas has been overly secularized are pouncing on a Wisconsin school that will present the tune with different words, under the title "Cold in the Night."

The controversy began when the father of a student at Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., was upset with the lyrics his child brought home to learn. He told the non-profit group Liberty Counsel they are: "Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite, how I wish I were happy and warm, safe with my family out of the storm."

Offended by the new words, he was unable to convince the school not to perform the song and contacted Liberty Counsel, which provides free legal assistance in religious freedom cases.

"We first try to educate a lot of people who are confused over the law," said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel. "This kind of a situation is not so much confusion as it is an insensitivity and an attempt to secularize Christmas, because here they're actually taking a song and mocking it, in my opinion."

Dodgeville School District officials say traditional, unaltered carols will also be sung, and that "Cold in the Night" is part of a decades-old Christmas play that students have performed in years past, and is not an attack on the religious nature of the holiday.

...The incident is the latest this season in what has become a contentious debate over how Christmas should be celebrated, with some religious leaders and media commentators alleging there is an all-out war on the holiday. Liberty Counsel, with help from evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, has launched a "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign," which Staver said aims to educate about how Christmas can be publicly celebrated and litigate for changes. Similarly, the Alliance Defense Fund has created its Christmas Project "to spread the message, 'Merry Christmas. It's okay to say it,'" according to the group's Web site.

And the Catholic League launched a boycott against Wal-Mart for replacing "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays," and yesterday resolved a dispute it had with the Lands' End clothing catalog for using the word "holiday" instead of "Christmas." Various municipalities have been criticized for lighting public "holiday trees" rather than Christmas trees.

When it comes to schools celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, the widely held standard is a 1980 court ruling, Florey v. Sioux Falls School District, which was upheld by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling says that religious songs can be a part of school concerts as long as secular songs are, too. So "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful" would have to be followed by something like "Frosty the Snowman" or "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

"It's fine for the public schools to observe the religious holidays in an academic and objective manner," said Jeremy Leaming, spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "It's not fine to do so … in a way to advance a specific religion."

"You can include 'Silent Night,'" he added. "Just don't put on a concert that looks like something your local Baptist church would be putting on. Public schools serve kids of many different religions and no religion at all."

Okay, everyone. Settle down. Your favorite relatively agnostic supposedly Hindu blogger is here to help.

The biggest problem here is that we live in a society where people are determined to be offended by innocent expressions. The second biggest problem is that we live in a society where people who are offended often run to court. The third biggest problem is that courts are stupid enough to take the cases.

I wish plenty of people "Merry Christmas." I'm not a Christian, but if they take offense to it, it's their own damn fault. If you say "hello" to me, how do you know that I don't take offense to your use of a term popularized by the British when they subjugated my people? I'm making that up (frankly, many of my fellow Indians probably would disown me), but it tends to make the person taking offense look like an idiot.

I tried explaining this once to a friend in law school, who told me that as a kid, she took great offense to people wishing her a "Merry Christmas." She was Jewish and wore a Star of David on a necklace around her neck, which she believed should have clued others in as to her faith. She particularly found it offensive when teachers or busdrivers for her school said it to her, since they were employees of the government.

What I tried to explain to her was that acting like this made her look like a complete freaking jerk. Okay, I didn't use that language, but I patiently explained that telling someone "Merry Christmas!" isn't, in most cases, an attempt to impose one's faith on her. It's an expression of good will toward one's fellow man, hoping that they have a good day. To be fair to her, she did understand it and took it in the spirit it was intended, but apparently still felt offended.

I don't understand why people feel particularly aggrieved, but I'm sure some of them have legitimate reasons for feeling put upon (the rest are grim, humorless weirdos who probably don't have any friends). But I feel put upon by the fact that no one hands me large sums of cash for sitting at home on the couch eating nachos and watching TV. I could complain about it, but that would make me look like a moron (moreso than usual). Similarly, complaining about people telling you "Merry Christmas" makes you look like a jackass.

As to the specific case above, I don't think there's a good reason to change the song, although the school seems to think they're telling some sort of story in the pageant with it. The real question is whether they changed it an effort to be less offensive, or in an effort to comply with the idiot jurisprudence mentioned in the article. Seriously, why is a court dictating the playlist for Christmas pageants? Doesn't this strike everyone as patently silly? I don't know that stores wishing people "Happy Holidays" are really worth getting excited about either, although it's patently stupid to call a Christmas tree a "holiday tree." Can't we all exercise a little common sense?

I thought Jonah Goldberg hit the nail on the head recently on this topic...

Just this week, the Capitol performed its own minor Christmas miracle of transubstantiation. At the beginning of the week, House Speaker Denny Hastert unveiled a "holiday tree." But a few days later, after some entirely predictable bah humbugs, he rechristened it a "Christmas" tree. (Similarly, when the city of Boston tried to unveil its official "Holiday tree," the premier of Nova Scotia, which had provided it as a gift, called it a nifty trick since, "when it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree.")

...What I think secularists don’t appreciate is how unfair this feels to religious people who believe that the secularists have, for all intents and purposes, a moral faith of their own. For example, back in the Dark Ages when John Ashcroft ruled with an iron fist, and decent people everywhere quaked at the prospect of borrowing Catcher in the Rye from the library lest they land in the gulag under the Patriot Act, Ashcroft was unable to ban a Gay Pride Month celebration at his own Department of Justice. I don’t think that celebrating Gay Pride Month would lead to the end of civilization, but I don’t think Christian Pride Month would either. And yet we all understand that Christian pride is a nonstarter on government premises.

...Liberals use the state to impose their morality all the time, and they get away with it because their faith isn’t called a religion.

Yet conservatives should be wary of launching a backlash. Just as it is counterproductive for a secular liberal to take offense at a well-intentioned “Merry Christmas,” it doesn’t help if a conservative says “Merry Christmas” when he really means “Eat yuletide, you atheistic bastard!” If you’re putting up a Christmas tree in order to tick off the ACLU, you’ve really missed the point.

That's about right. Look, I'm a barely practicing Hindu who knows jack squat about my own religious faith. My wife is a practicing Catholic, but her maternal grandparents are Jewish. But if you see us out in public, feel free to wish us a "Joyous Ramadan" (not now, since I think it's over) or "Blessed Kwanzaa" in addition to wishing us a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hannukah, and a Happy Diwali. I'll take all the good wishes I can get. So should the rest of you.