Whiskey Wednesday

Santa Claus and al Qaeda

Yes Virginia, political correctness can get out of hand and it can make the world a boring place. But sometimes it’s necessary to police those too stupid to make their own distinctions of what is and isn’t appropriate.
On the one hand, I get the Christian-right’s point about the transformation of Christmas into Winter Holiday and the homogenizing of the season. America has successfully celebrated Christmas void of religious connotation for 30 years or so. Those who want to find spiritual meaning in the holiday are free to do so (as are they in the case of Easter, Halloween and Groundhog Day), and those who look at it as a great excuse to show up to work hung over can have it our way too.
However, I have no patience for Christian’s claim they are being discriminated against because the office Christmas party is now dubbed a holiday party. Get over it! You folks are the ones who have tried for years to rewrite history and distort fact to turn Halloween into something evil. Then you launched a large-scale effort to replace “Satan’s Birthday” with Fall Festivals and the like. You’ve tried to stop trick-or-treating while hiding Easter eggs on the church lawn and continuing to let Santa come down your chimney. Excuse me if your crying over Christ being taken out of Christmas reeks of crocodile tears.
I also say “Get over it!” to those who are offended that the liquor store is closed on Christmas but not during Kwanza – wait, maybe that’s not the best example… Anyway, do what I do when someone assumingly says to you, “Merry Christmas,” a month before the actual event. Turn to them, smile and say, “Oh thanks, but I’m a Christ-killing Jew.” We can all coexist if we stop looking for reasons to be offended.
The point of all that is to call your attention to a CNN report on this debate, featuring Bob Knight of the Christian conservative group Concerned Women for America (an organization which seems to be completely comprised of men) and Air America’s Sam Seder. Seder launched into a hysterical tongue-in-cheek tirade that nails the absurdity of the fundamentalist’s argument.

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

The rest is at Atrios. It’s good.

posted by ThomG @ 10:47:00 AM