Opinion

ACLU Wages War on Christmas

It’s that “most wonderful time of the year” again. Children eagerly await a visit from jolly Santa Claus, while their parents try to squeeze shopping into a schedule already filled with parties, parades, church programs, and visiting relatives. Grandmothers bake dozens of gingerbread and sugar cookies, while rascally uncles down too much eggnog. Wealthy northerners travel to Florida to escape cold weather, while everyone else yearns for a white Christmas.

And the ACLU—that staunch defender of American traditions and values—threatens to sue public schools for acknowledging what all the excitement is about.

Each Christmas season is marked by a series of spirit-dampening stories of towns forced to disassemble nativity scenes, retail stores intimidated into requiring employees to use generic greetings like “Happy Holidays,” and similar Scroogish travesties. This year, one such story comes from Tennessee, where the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to 137 public school administrators, supposedly in response to complaints from families, reminding them not to focus on any one religious holiday.

In other words, don’t call Christmas parties “Christmas parties.” Call them winter celebrations, holiday galas, solstice shindigs, or any other creative misnomer that obfuscates their true purpose and creates a comfortable non-reality for the handful of unfortunate students whose malcontent parents are offended by the celebration of a holiday that is jointly religious and secular in nature.

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 92% of Americans celebrate Christmas, while a mere 6% do not. Of that 6%, only 25% celebrate an alternative holiday. That’s a whopping total of 1.5% of Americans who celebrate a December holiday instead of Christmas. And, apparently, most of them live in Tennessee; how else could that state’s chapter of the ACLU have received so many complaints?

Defending the letter, Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee, cites U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and hints that acknowledging Christmas could be considered an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

She is alluding, of course, to the oft-misinterpreted establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from establishing a state religion. It obviously applies to a third-grade teacher planning a classroom Christmas party for the last day before break—or so those on the far left argue, rather unconvincingly.

Could it be that Weinberg is one of the 6% of Americans who do not celebrate Christmas, and is using the ACLU’s legal muscle and financial assets to push a personal agenda? Such Grinch-like behavior would certainly be unprofessional, if not unethical. If there was a Santa, Weinberg would be on the naughty list for sure.

The ACLU expects public schools to stage a pointless charade of pretending that the concerts, parties, and vacations common to this time of year are not specifically scheduled around December 25. This is an unreasonable expectation which deserves no serious consideration.

The correct course of action for public school administrators to take is to ignore the ACLU, which is not a government entity and does not represent the views of a majority of parents. It would be wrong to alter school policy simply to avoid the hassle of a lawsuit; this would be yielding to what is called the “heckler’s veto,” by which an antagonistic group goads the government into restricting another group’s First Amendment rights. In this case, the hecklers are the ACLU and the instigators it claims to represent.

Lawsuits are expensive, true, and no administrator wants to be on the receiving end of one, but what is the cost of a lawsuit compared to the cost of an eroded culture and disunited society, purposely divided by secularist troublemakers who value political correctness over common sense?

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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One Comment

  1. I’m sick to death of people being offended by the word Christmas! We don’t say Happy Holiday for Valentines day or any other celebration. We call the celebration what it is. I may not like to hear Happy Ramadan but it doesn’t bother me…I just ignore it. People who don’t like to hear Christmas can do the same.

  2. You know if this was the America that I grew up in during the 50’s and 60’s, and you tried to take down a nativity scene you’d probably be beaten to death by wome swinging purses. You don’t go ordering something that is a Constitutional right. And since the American White Christian has had it’s own police used against it to force it to do something they shouldn’t have to do, and don’t have to do no matter if fifty liberal judges order you to take it down, you still don’t have to no matter how many cops show up. Send the whole damn police dept. and you still don’t have to do anything but go inside and watch a movie on TV. And if somebody comes on your property to try and take down your nativity scene you can come out onto the lawn with a shotgun and order the bastards to get off your property and the cops have to order the ACLU thugs off your property or they will lock them up.

    Ohhh, but this is America 2011 where the liberals have learned that they can use pressure from the police unions to force cops to do what they should not be doing and that is arresting you if you come out onto your lawn with a gun and order people off your property who are trespassing to begin with, and secondly destroying your private property which they should be the only reason anyone is being arrested for anything. But if a cop said, “I know this is wrong. I am not going to arrest this man for displaying a nativity on his own property, or out in front of his privately owned business or on the front of his privately owned business.” At that time his supervisor would order him to make the arrest for violation of a court order violation of people’s rights to be able to walk down the street without having to see some Christian thing that offends him. And if the cop refused, which he is supposed to be doing, and is supposed to be protecting our rights not the bogus non-rights of people who have no say in the matter and not the non-rights of some judge who doesn’t have the right, and cannot over ride the Constitution no matter what.

    But White Christian’s have been shut up for so long that we’ve lost our voices as a people who created the whole holiday that millions of American’s of all races enjoy during the Christmas time of the year. We did that, and kids in schools should be taught that it was White Christian’s who started the tradition and not any other race. Blacks get a whole month to celebrate some bogus history of a people who don’t have much of a history as far as what culture, customs, or traditions that ALL AMERICAN’S have celebrated for generations, but they get a whole month. White people are having the customs, traditions, and culture that they created taken away from them instead of getting the due credit they deserve. But liberals think they have more right to use cops to force White people to give up their rights and customs and no other race in America has to do that or has the cops used on them if they celebrate their customs or traditions. What’s wrong with that picture?

    We all used to celebrate each others customs, culture, and traditions as everyone else used to celebrate the customs, culture, and traditions that belonged to White people as well. That is what used to happen in America before liberals started claiming that it was only White people’s culture that needs to be destroyed so nobody finds out about it, and that everyone used to partisipate in celebrating what was AMERICAN TRADITIONS. They weren’t Black, Mexican, or Irish, or Muslim, or anything liberals lie about, it was all AMERICAN CULTURE. This is what liberals want to kill off. What do they plan on replacing American traditions with when they’re through? Islamic? Beheadings, wife beatings in December?

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