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Darth Papa
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THIS is a great article, from today's NYT:
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/arti...00010000000001
Quote:
Updated: 04:04 PM EST
Good Will Took a Holiday, Whatever You Call It
By PAUL VITELLO, The New York Times
At a Christmas tree lighting ceremony recently in Manhasset, N.Y., a crowd of 200 gasped at the intemperate words uttered by a public official who was angry at a priest for an invocation the official considered too religious.
Holiday displays all over the country are drawing criticism. Some are being called too religious while others are said to be too secular.
In Huntington in nearby Suffolk County, people are still fuming about the lawsuit filed last week to remove the crèche and the menorah displayed on the village green.
In Florida, rather than a complaint about too much religion, conservative Christian lawyers brought suits recently against two towns whose holiday displays on public property the lawyers considered too secular.
The suits demanded that Nativity scenes be placed there, and they were.
If nothing quite says holiday spirit to you like family tension and the perennial rehashing of old scores, then this might be your kind of holiday season.
With a new aggressiveness, some conservative Christian groups have declared war this year against what they see as an attack of secularization on Christmas, using boycotts and lawsuits to invoke the baby Jesus and the words "Merry Christmas" with an unusual fervor.
At the same time, members of other religious groups and civil libertarians have mounted a resistance to what they see as a creeping imposition of religion on public and commercial places, in a few cases filing suits of their own.
But in the vast middle - in that central core of the population where people shop and the Chipmunks sing, and contradictory notions live in peace, and the Festival of Lights shares deep and undisputed psychic space with the glittering Christmas tree - there is a sense of impending loss.
If the bellicose atmosphere of national politics can infect even this season of childhood and enchantment, as this thinking goes, we are all in some kind of big trouble.
"It's like everybody's going crazy," said Liseanne Altmann, a Nassau County legislator from Great Neck, the town next to Manhasset. "I wish they would all chill out a little. At this time of year, the overarching theme should be coming together, not division."
Jim Ellis, an advertising executive strolling past the Christmas-wreathed light poles of downtown Huntington, a minute's sleigh ride from the town's recently contested Nativity scene and menorah display, said such disputes at a time like this were a kind of self-indulgence.
"With all that's going on, I mean kids are dying every day in the war," he said, "and this is what we're worried about? People have too much time on their hands."
It is hardly the first contentious holiday season. In recent decades, civic quarrels over the placement of religious holiday symbols in taxpayer-owned space have resulted in various court decisions, most sanctioning the use of such symbols as long as they are displayed in a sort of panoply of the religious and the secular - a crèche beside a menorah beside a Santa and a Kwanzaa kinara, for example.
But in the uncharted territory of a conflict whose terms are as often unspoken as they are openly discussed, there can be surprises like the one that happened in Manhasset on Dec. 2, when the Rev. Nick Zientarski invoked "Jesus Christ, our Lord" in blessing the Christmas tree at a public ceremony across the street from the North Hempstead Town Hall.
Town Supervisor Jon Kaiman, who had presided at the ceremony, was heard muttering angrily during the blessing. After Father Zientarski finished, Mr. Kaiman stood up and addressed the crowd of about 200.
"This is inappropriate," the supervisor said of the invocation. "I just want to make it clear that this is in no way a religious ceremony."
Mr. Kaiman's response was considered rude by an overwhelming majority of several hundred people who e-mailed or phoned his office afterward to complain.
"Manhasset is a predominantly Christian town and a conservative town," one of Father Zientarski's parishioners told Newsday.
A prominent local citizen, the Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, who has made what he calls the "war on Christmas" a regular feature of "The O'Reilly Factor," scolded Mr. Kaiman on the air.
"It never occurred to me that I was stepping into this national discussion," Mr. Kaiman said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "The depth of the passion people feel about this issue was really eye-opening."
In several letters and opinion articles published in local newspapers, and in a series of meetings with residents, Mr. Kaiman has apologized for what he conceded was the rudeness of his response.
Similar waves of condemnation befell Mitchell Pashkin after he filed suit on Dec. 7 to force Huntington to dismantle its traditional holiday display of a Nativity scene and a menorah in a public park. He said they violated the First Amendment's establishment clause, but later agreed to a compromise wherein the symbols were accompanied by signs explaining their provenance - the crèche from a Catholic group, the menorah from a synagogue.
"It's not about Christmas," said Mr. Pashkin, a town resident and a lawyer, who received dozens of angry phone calls after his suit was publicized. "It's about whether religious symbols should be displayed on public property at all. The government should not be seen as endorsing anybody's religion."
The same religious holiday display had been put up in the same park for years, and had offended him all along, but what made him file the suit this year was hard for him to identify.
"I just thought it was time to do it," Mr. Pashkin said.
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, suggested that civil libertarians everywhere were on heightened alert, consciously or not, because of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's widely publicized "Friend or Foe" Christmas campaign, an effort to counter perceived attacks against Christmas.
The Falwell campaign, which was announced soon after Thanksgiving, threatened boycotts against the retailers Wal-Mart, Target and Lowe's for using the term "holiday" instead of "Christmas" in advertising.
An affiliated group, Liberty Counsel, brought suit to force the Florida towns of Neptune Beach and Wellington to include Nativity scenes in displays that previously featured only a Christmas tree and a menorah. The group threatened to sue an elementary school in Dodgeville, Wis., where in a school play about a homeless family, the lyric of the song "Silent Night" was changed to eliminate religious references.
"This campaign has never been so aggressive as it is now," Mr. Lynn said. "They have 1,500 lawyers standing by, ready to promote this idea they have, what I call this Christian triumphalism, anywhere they can gin up some case."
Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, said the campaign only sought "to make sure that Christmas is not censored from the holiday season."
"We have a national holiday called Christmas," Mr. Staver said in an interview, "and the central meaning of Christmas is the birth of Jesus."
In Manhasset the other day, a woman passing the Christmas tree that started the angry tensions was asked what she made of it all.
"I am French," said the woman, Gigi Anderson, a real estate agent in Manhasset for more than 30 years. "I maybe have a different view than most Americans, but in France we do not make so much of religious matters. They are private matters."
Patricia Sciortino, shopping bags in each hand and the cold weather's rouge in both cheeks, voiced a more common American view of religious observance. It is a shared experience, she said, something akin to the block party, where everyone brings a dish.
"I think we should all celebrate everything," said Mrs. Sciortino, who was interviewed in Manhasset. "We should have Christmas, we should have Hanukkah and whatever people have. I think we should all learn to respect each other. Everyone should have the right to be who they are. That's what the country is all about."
"Have a nice day," she added.
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