Posted on 11/27/2004 1:43:00 PM PST by CHARLITE
In Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge wishes that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
Scrooge would make the perfect public-school bureaucrat -- except he’d insist on calling it a holiday pudding, playing “Winter Wonderland” as background music, and doing it all in the name of inclusiveness, sensitivity and church-state separation.
In the latest manifestation of what Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition calls “secular fundamentalism,” the South Orange/Mapplewood, New Jersey School District has banned playing the instrumental music of Christmas carols.
In the early 1990s, the district prohibited the singing of Christmas carols. However, in an embarrassing oversight, bands continued to play “Silent Night” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
Such gross insensitivity and incipient theocracy shall cease forthwith, the district’s superintendent decreed. From now on, the 40-member Columbia High School brass ensemble will be restricted to uplifting numbers like “Frosty the Snowman,” according to the Newark Star-Ledger.
Furthermore, an October 29th directive provides that printed programs for holiday concerts “must avoid graphics which refer to the holidays, such as Christmas trees and dreidels.” In the South Orange/Mapplewood School District, they celebrate generic “holiday.” Even under torture, they won’t disclose more than that.
The public schools have become a major battleground in the war on Christmas (“Lookout, Santa, incoming!”) and, by extension, Christianity.
Last year, a kindergartener at a school near Portland, Oregon was told he couldn’t bring cards with a religious message to a school Christmas party. When a teacher noticed that little Justin Cortez’s cards contained the dreaded J-word (Jesus), she confiscated the offending items and forwarded them to the principal who sent them to the superintendent. Thus was the school’s secularist early-warning system activated.
The New York City school system allows menorahs and Islamic symbols in holiday displays, but not nativity scenes. Christians thereby are excluded from inclusiveness, presumably in the name of sensitivity.
In 2002, the mother of a student in the Del Mar Union School District in San Diego was told she could no longer read a Christmas book to her child’s 4th-grade class. Also, at the Sage Canyon School, teachers were ordered to remove jewelry with a Christmas theme. First a flashing Santa pin, then a state church.
Same year, instructors at an elementary school in Sacramento were told not to use the word “Christmas” in the classroom or in written material. A la “1984,” in public education, Christmas has become the un-holiday.
In Yonkers, New York, public school employees were ordered to purge holiday decorations with religious themes. Silent-Night sanitizing?
According to Rev. Jerry Falwell, a New Jersey middle school cancelled a field trip to attend a performance of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” One supposes there was a fear the Ghost of Christmas Past would cause mass conversions – or worse.
When a school displays a modicum of common sense here, secularist vigilantes threaten dire consequences. Last year, the Elbert County Charter School in Elizabeth, Colorado had a holiday program that included such proselytizing anthems as “Jingle Bells.” The ACLU and Anti-Defamation League threatened to sue unless the program was cleansed. A joint letter from the censors to the principal claimed, “Jewish students no longer feel safe or welcome” at the school. Islamist pogroms are going on across Europe, but in Colorado Jewish kids are threatened by jingle all the way?
The ADL/ACLU letter demanded that the Elbert County Charter School “take immediate steps to comply with the constitutional separation of church and state.”
Even if the First Amendment required the separation of government and religion (it doesn’t), no federal court has ever held that Christmas carols, Christmas decorations, Christmas cards, Christmas books or Christmas greetings constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause.
The closest the judiciary has come to a ruling which might effect public-school Christmas celebrations is the Three-Reindeer Rule, in which the Supreme Court held that that there must be a sufficient number of secular items in a Christmas display to allow religious symbols (crèches and menorahs) to pass constitutional muster.
Back in New Jersey, South Orange/Mapplewood Schools Superintendent Peter P. Horoschak explained the rationale behind the new policy, “Rather than try to respond to all the various religions and try to balance them, it’s best to stay away from that and simply have a nonreligious tone to them and have more of a seasonal tone.”
There it is. If we can’t provide equal time for every religion on earth (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, you-name-it), there can be no reference to -- or musical suggestion of -- the holiday that’s celebrated by 96% of the American people.
When liberals can’t use their convenient misinterpretation of the First Amendment (reading church-state separation into the Establishment Clause), their fall-back position is multiculturalism, inclusiveness and sensitivity.
Little Omar will feel excluded by trees with tinsel. Myron may fear the onset of another crusade if he hears the strains of “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem” drifting through the hallways.
But this hyper-sensitivity to religious minorities requires gross insensitivity to America’s majority religion. You know, the one that begins with a “C.”
Since at least 9 out of 10 taxpayers are Christians, they foot the bill for a public education system on a search-and-destroy mission against even the mildest expressions of their holidays.
America was founded by Christians and based on Judeo-Christian values. The signers of the Declaration of Independence and drafters of the Constitution all were Christians – not Buddhists, or Wiccans or Zoroastrians. Were it not for Protestant Christianity, we wouldn’t have limited government, separation of powers, a Bill of Rights or religious tolerance. In short, without Christians, the United States of America would not exist.
Even in an age when traditional religion is driven underground, our currency still says “One nation under God” – not one nation under Allah or Shiva. On January 22nd, like all of his predecessors, George W. Bush will take the oath of office on a Bible that tells the story of the Nativity.
The brave men who fought and died for America in every war from the Revolution to Iraq, overwhelmingly were Christians. Count the number of crosses in Arlington National Cemetery (on federal property, no less). Add the Stars of David. Now compare them to the number of crescents.
Yet in a nation founded by Christians on Christian values, defended by Christians from Bunker Hill to Falluja, primarily populated by Christians, and whose public institutions are financed by Christians, most references to the holiday that celebrates the birth of the founder of Christianity have been expunged.
This isn’t just a war over Jingle Bells and holly wreaths, but a war on Christianity, which in turn is a war on the Judeo-Christian ethic.
The public schools are busy inculcating other values – humanism, environmentalism, internationalism, multiculturalism, sexual anarchy and New Age spirituality. (In California schools, there’s even mandatory instruction on the tenets of Islam, including I’m-a-Moslem role-playing.) The goal is to create a society the very antithesis of that envisioned by the Founding Fathers and the patriots who followed in their footsteps.
Reference to America’s Judeo-Christian roots would interfere with the ongoing liberal re-ordering of our society – which, ultimately, will be neither jolly nor result in peace on Earth and good will toward men.
Now, if I had my way, every public school administrator who banned Christmas carols, Christmas decorations, etc. -- would be boiled with their own anti-Christmas directives and buried with a rolled up copy of the latest ACLU newsletter through their hearts.
Comments:coldsteel@rcn.com
Moral Absolutes Ping.
I love Don Feder. And he's a Jew. Why is an attack on Christ-Mass an attack on moral absolutes? Because the moral absolutes as written in the Bible are also written in every theist religion in the world, and inscribed in the heart of every human being.
Atheists and secularists may be able to eventually remove every holy book, every religious song, symbol, and teacher from the world, but they can never remove the laws of God from every atom or from the deepest recesses of their hearts.
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
Thank you for the beautiful pictures!!!
Ping
I really think it is because about half this country does not value their heritage or maybe even know anything about it. They've been indoctrinated themselves and don't have a clue as to who the founding fathers even were, let alone that they were Christians. THey are spoon fed what popular opinion should be and they go for it. They are susceptable to the guilt trip put on by special interest groups. They stand for nothing, still stuck in the high school mode of "I want to be liked". It's a shame, but I feel very strongly this attitude will not change without a complete shift in public schools and as we see they are just getting more and more hostile not only to just Christians now, but the Christian roots of this country. I have little hope that this will be turned around.
As an aside, thank the good Lord for the oppurtunity for my child to go to a small Christian school. She not only hears about Christ at every turn, but celebrates Advent and other church year events. I can't say my son's situation is so bad though either. He's autistic and in a preschool for such situation in the local ps and he once came home with a Valentine and then an Easter card with a very forward Christian reference. Teachers did not weed them out or as far as I know repremand the parent so I don't believe most of our schools locally are the hostile places some other school systems seem to be, but I still enjoy my daughter's school where the same thing we teach at home is reinforced by her teacher.
Well here are the full lyrics. Don't see one reference to any Christian holiday. It is a song regarding the winter festivity of riding in a sleigh during a snowy day. I guess any music a Christian plays regularly during their holiday season now is up for being banned. These people are completely off their rockers--absolutely Grinches if ever there was one. I can think of no other explanation then the leftist hatred of what they percieve as Christian or in the case AMERICAN being surpressed and belittled.
Dashing through the snow
In a one-horse open sleigh
O'er the fields we go
Laughing all the way
Bells on bobtail ring
Making spirits bright
What fun it is to ride and sing
A sleighing song tonight
Chorus:
Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh
O jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh
A day or two ago
I thought I'd take a ride
And soon Miss Fanny Bright
Was seated by my side
The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
We ran into a drifted bank
And there we got upsot
(chorus)
A day or two ago
The story I must tell
I went out on the snow
And on my back I fell
A gent was riding by
In a one-horse open sleigh
He laughed at me as I there lay
But quickly drove away
(chorus)
Now the ground is white
Go it while you're young
Take the girls along
and sing this sleighing song
Just bet a bobtailed bay
Two forty as his speed
Hitch him to an open sleigh and crack!
You'll take the lead
(chorus)
I'm with you. We use a small Christian school, but if folks would just have the conviction to do this, even if in protest for a few months. How on earth could a school half full justify getting its funding if the students left in droves. It won't happen though, you'll hear people b*tch about it at work, but that's all they will do. It ticks them off, but is isn't worth losing the late model car over or having a few less Christmas gifts to have someone home to be there with the kids.
You know, they only reinforce the truth found in the Bible by their hatred of it. Really, that is all they do for most Christians who pay attention.
Hey...I thought the second verse of Jingle Bells was...
'Down in Mexico,
They have got no snow,
They ain't got no snow,
Down in Meh-i-co!
Sit around all day,
Here the music play,
When the people sing,
Tequila glasses ring'.
:-) In your wild Mexican, sunnyshiny dreams it is;-)
Seriously...that's what we sing! *LOL*
I go out with the Light Opera Society I'm involved with every year...and that's the second verse to Jingle Bells that we sing every year! *LOL* (Last year we made €16,000...which is about $20,000 for Meals on Wheels, and a couple of other charities singing that *LOL*)
They got their inch, and are now starting on the mile.
You are exactly right. These ungodly public schools exist because "Christian" parents send their children to them, thus insuring that the state pays the school for their attendance, and Christian taxpayers pay the salaries of these anti-Christ school administrators who are offending the faith of these little ones every day in this anti-God environment. And you know what Jesus said about offending the faith of the children, I'm sure. (Clue...it has something to do with a millstone being hung around one's neck and being dropped in the ocean.)
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