"Thank you very much for demonstrating your paper’s low level of journalistic integrity in today’s reporting of the “Santa Controversy.” I was misquoted in both ofyour articles, and much of what I had to say--including the main points of the interview I agreed to give to your reporter, Mr. Schuler, were omitted entirely. Perhaps these qualities is why your circulation is so low, why free papers show up at my door all the time, as well why I get frequent nuisance calls from your telemarketers wanting me to subscribe to your three-page paper. You really do need to give it away.
I never said in my telephone interviews with Mr. Schuyler that I want everyone to “agree with” my beliefs about teaching, or not teaching, Santa Claus to children. What I said, as I stated in my letter to the editor and evidently need to clarify further, was that 1) what public school is doing by promoting Santa Claus is promoting a form of religion; that 2) religion should not be promoted in public school; 3) a teacher should not be required to promote a religion in public school; and 4) the lesson plan requiring me to promote Santa Claus was imposing religion on me, not the other way around. I certainly am not responsible for, or interested in, making people believe as I do about anything, for that is definitely not my job.
Leonard Martin, a friend of mine, is without a doubt the gentlest, humblest, meekest man I know, a devout Christian who practices his belief in God with the highest integrity. He does not believe in violence or retribution or “revenge.” Mr. Martin never used the phrase “a form of revenge” in speaking to Mr.Schuler, and yet he was represented as saying this or believing in this.
You neglected to include my entire statements about freedom of speech and religion. Don’t you like the Constitution? It read: “Furthermore, freedom of speech and religion, no matter how unpopular the speech or against cultural norms the religion, are protected rights under the Constitution of the United States.” I also said, in full: that belief in Santa is “ a distorted substitute for the Judeo-Christian God; a false form of Christianity; a zealously-protected American idol.” I also said, without edit, “If people are upset about the revelation to children that Santa Claus is a myth-- which all children who are taught this lie find or figure out eventually-- perhaps it is because Santa is that zealously-guarded idol of their own modern religion.” This statment only makes sense if you include the phrases you omitted.
I spoke in trust with Mr. Schuler, who told me the article was to be a front-page story showing Leonard Martin’s sign, and that the inclusion of my involvement at the school was to be a small part of that story. It was under those terms that I agreed to be interviewed. Instead, your editors put me on the front page- rather negatively, in fact-- and Mr. Martin’s sign, small and off to the bottom, on page five. I would never have agreed to speak to this reporter at all, had I known that your paper would distort both my words and its intentions about the use of my words. Evidently a lame front-page “contoversy” beats stating quotations and sentiments accurately and without bias. Is this how you think you will sell a few more papers?
I would wish you to print this letter in its entirety, but based on today’s experience, I highly doubt all my words will appear as I intend them to appear, which means all of my words, none deleted, without your “editing.” It might even make your paper bigger."
What a stick-in-the-nethers, crotchety, intolerable twit.
"Last week I substituted at a local elementary school in Lebanon County. The lesson plan required me to read the 1882 poem “The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore to two classes of students.
Dear god, another moronic public school teacher... Incompetent to boot. The "poem" titled "The Night before Christmas" was first published in 1823 (that's Eighteen Twenty-Three for the dslexic), not in 1882 as this fact-challenged kill-joy so asserted. Should have told the children that the actual title was "A Visit from St. Nicholas", according to the poem's author.
Sloppy scholarship by someone who confuses competence with personal conviction. Happens a lot with the holier-than-thou crowd...
dvwjr
The teacher wrote:
You neglected to include my entire statements about freedom of speech and religion. Don't you like the Constitution? It read:
"Furthermore, freedom of speech and religion, no matter how unpopular the speech or against cultural norms the religion, are protected rights under the Constitution of the United States."
______________________________________
Some forms of speech are not constitutionally protected...
Freedom of Speech
Address:http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/410/410lect08.htm
Nice of her to decide for the children's parents. I'm sure she'll chauffer the kids to the local abotionist when they're older, since the parents need not know about that either. Hey kids, your parents only love you because they fear death. Why not just say Christ was only a man, or didn't exist, or that God is just a construct of a weak and needy mind? Morality and ethics are just a measure of a persons insecurity in taking/doing what they want, and to heck anybody else.
No one asked you to present the notion of Santa Claus as truth. They just asked you to read the damned poem and shut the hell up. They also didn't ask you to tell the kids that it was their parents who bought the presents, denying them of the traditional Christmas fun that so many parents and children enjoy.
I bet you teach the "ozone hole" myth as fact. I bet you similarly teach the darwinist macroevolution myth as fact. I'm sure that your depiction of Martin Luther King is as mythical as most current depictions. Yet you pretend that you won't "teach" that Santa Claus is real when all you were asked to do was read a poem.
If you were my child's substitute teacher, I'd punch you in the mouth for this.
Bump the funny thread.
Some of you going to out the Tooth Fairy too?
redrock
You are right. If people would read the LAST LINE of her letter they would see she is a Believer. I have always felt that Santa Clause overshadows the true meaning and reason for Christmas, celebrating the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. I think Santa Clause just confuses children about the real meaning of Christmas, just like the Easter Bunny at Easter.
Theresa's last paragraph shows that she's probably a very devout Christian who doesn't want added idols. Quite a few people here have called her by the _B_ word. That tells us a lot.
Roman emperors outlawed monotheistic celebrations and enforced pagan replacement celebrations. Santa Claus is one of the many substitutes promoted since then to instill pagan thinking. And for a religious reason (rejection of perceived paganism), Christmas celebrations were not accepted in America until the 1800s.
Apparently, the core Protestant beliefs were dissolved in this country a long time ago, and any return to such beliefs will be answered by the kind of hostility that instigates physical terrorism.
IMO, it's time for the big test to see if our USA really wants to make a law establishing old European religion. If it's established, then that will also undoubtedly be put to the test and have the same divinely decided outcome that it once had in England.
What an evil bitter witch. Someone, quick, hide her broomstick so she can't travel to anymore classromms hurting little children!
My brother-in-law is away on active duty. His wife, my sister-in-law, was expecting their fourth on Christmas. Instead, she went into labor last week and had a stillborn baby girl.
My little niece and nephews were happily expecting their little sister. Instead, Mommy came home brokenhearted.
They were at my house the next night, with Dad home on leave. Then...a knock on the door.
There was Santa Claus himself, with a bag of gifts for my kids and their little cousins.
Now, you might say that the gifts were from neighbors, and that the jolly old fellow had rented his costume.
But you would be wrong.
This "teacher" has no idea what she is talking about - the poor thing.
Myths? Now public school teachers are having moral issues about teaching something that might be a myth? Heck, about half of what public schools teach as "fact" is nothing but myth.
See tag line.
So then she's in favor of not teaching the fiction of evolution if the teacher believes it is false or against their religion?
Somehow I expect she'd just be a hypocrite instead.
May Christ deliver us from soulless Puritans.
If she cannot in good conscious read The Night Before Christmas and not shatter these childrens dreams, then she a) should not be teaching or b) be teaching college where it sounds more like she would fit in these days.
Liberal plots notwithstanding, the Americans who succeeded in banning the holiday were the Puritans of 17th-century Massachusetts. Between 1659 and 1681, Christmas celebrations were outlawed in the colony, and the law declared that anyone caught "observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings." Finding no biblical authority for celebrating Jesus' birth on Dec[ember] 25, the theocrats who ran Massachusetts regarded the holiday as a mere human invention, a remnant of a heathen past. They also disapproved of the rowdy celebrations that went along with it. "How few there are comparatively that spend those holidays … after an holy manner," the Rev[erend] Increase Mather lamented in 1687. "But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth."Today's Puritans are no different from the Puritans of the "good old days": a bunch of frowny-faced fun-ruiners determined to suck every last drop of joy out of Christianity.After the English Restoration government reclaimed control of Massachusetts from the Puritans in the 1680s, one of the first acts of the newly appointed royal governor of the colony was to sponsor and attend Christmas religious services. Perhaps fearing a militant Puritan backlash, for the 1686 services he was flanked by redcoats. The Puritan disdain for the holiday endured: As late as 1869, public-school kids in Boston could be expelled for skipping class on Christmas Day.
The Puritans are the most cited example of anti-Christmas spirit, but not the only one. Quakers, too, took a pass, reasoning that, in the words of 17th-century Quaker apologist Robert Barclay, "All days are alike holy in the sight of God." The Quakers never translated their dismissal of Christmas into legislation in their stronghold in Colonial Pennsylvania. But local meetings, as the Quakers call their assemblies, urged their members to disdain Christmas and to be "zealous in their testimony against the holding up of such days." As late as 1810, the Philadelphia Democratic Press reported that few Pennsylvanians celebrated the holiday.
Observance of Christmas, or the lack thereof, was one way to differentiate among the Christian sects of Colonial and 19th-century America. Anglicans, Moravians, Dutch Reformed, and Lutherans, to name just a few, did; Quakers, Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and some Presbyterians did not. An 1855 New York Times report on Christmas services in the city noted that Baptist and Methodist churches were closed because they "do not accept the day as a holy one," while Episcopal and Catholic churches were open and "decked with evergreens." New England Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher remembered decorative greenery as an exotic touch that one could see only in Episcopal churches, "a Romish institution kept up by the Romish church."
No thanks, Conservatrix.
"May God protect me from gloomy saints." - Saint Teresa of Avila
Her words probably went over the head of the reporter, who is likely paid so little he qualifies for food stamps and has to work a second job (hard to focus on your work when exhausted).
The commercialization of Christmas is a problem, but there is a cultural lesson that goes along with it, if we are going to say that children have to learn the cultural significance of other religious or pseudoreligious "holidays."
Certainly not an English teacher, eh?