The "War on Christmas" has a local warrior

And that would be Fred Honsberger.

I heard him yesterday on KDKA on the one hand ranting about a story where red and green cookies were banned at a local school. On the other hand, he said he has a problem when people complain about businesses substituting "Happy Holidays" for "Merry Christmas."

I guess he's for protecting Christmas unless he's against it. Or is that the other way round? Anyway, he also said that this is a "predominantly Christian nation."

Well I guess on how he defines that phrase. On the one hand, 2001's American Religious Identification Survey showed that about 77% of Americans identified themselves as Christian.
So if he was merely pointing out the nation's religious democraphics, then the facts speak for themselves. End of story.

It's what happens after those facts have spoken for themselves that there's trouble.

We do have two parallel streams here - one legislative (how school districts should act in the month of December) and commercial (should Walmart tell its employees how to greet people in the month of December).

I have to say that I'm with Fred on the latter. Hey, who would've guess I'd EVER agree with Fred Honsberger? A business can do what it wants. If it makes the wrong decisions on how it treats its customers, then it looses business. If it makes too many wrong decisions, it goes out of business. Calling them "Holiday sales" instead of "Christmas sales" recognises that there are more than a few non-Christians who might want to shop in December. It's not personal, it's business.

I'm more interested in the legislative stream.

If it's the case that a majority of citizens in this country are Christian, then does it follow that the laws should reflect that? Are Christians entitled to more rights because they're in the majority?

If so, then that runs head first into that pesky First Amendment.

Here's the text, and it contains some of my favorite words in the English Language:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It should be noted that Justice David Souter (a G. H. W. Bush appointee, by the way) wrote in the majority opinion in Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."

While I am not a lawyer, it still sounds very very good to me.

I know there are legal originalists who do their best to try to read the Constitution the way the Founding Fathers wrote it. Not sure how they'd rearrange the First Amendment, but to them there's still the issue of the Treaty of Tripoli and it's Article 11.

What's that, you say? It was a treaty unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1797 and it contained this phrase:

As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion...

Whah??

It was first sent to the Senate late in George Washington's second term and ratified during the Adams' administration. There's no record of any dissent or debate when the treaty was read into the Senate record. Nor was there any record of any public outcry when the treaty was published in three of the nation's newspapers.

No debate, no outcry. I am assuming there were still a few founding fathers wandering around Philadelphia in the late 1790s. If the nation was founded on Christian principles, don't you think there'd be some disagreement with the treaty?

This "War on Christmas" is a silly diversion. Any minute a conservative spends complaining about an assault on Christmas is one more minute that that conservative doesn't have to defend the failed policies of the Bush Administration.

And that, I suspect, is the whole point.