No Holy Night
By Brad Reed
December 8, 2006 | The American Prospect
With Democrats about to assume control of both houses of Congress, we liberals will have an unprecedented opportunity to vanquish Christmas once and for all.
For the past twelve years, the Republicans have successfully shelved our anti-Christmas agenda, forcing us to wage a covert insurgency against the sacred holiday through lawsuits and Internet postings.
Essentially, our approach has been to sue anyone who says "Merry Christmas" and then make fun of them with our vicious left-wing smear blogs. As FOX News pundit and Christmas Warrior Bill O'Reilly put it, "The ACLU goes around the country suing everybody and intimidating people... and in tandem, you use your left-wing smear websites to go after anyone who stands up for Christmas." (O'Reilly has kept up the good fight this year, claiming Wal-Mart as a scalp when the mega-chain announced it was reverting from "Happy Holidays" to "Merry Christmas" in its labels.)
Indeed, our vast anti-yuletide conspiracy has been so successful that conservative pundit John Gibson wrote a factually-stringent and exhaustively-researched exposé about it called The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Holiday is Worse Than You Thought. "Christmas is under attack in such a sustained and strategized manner that there is, no doubt, a war on Christmas," wrote Gibson, who then detailed the horrors of retailers who forced their employees to wish customers "Happy Holidays." Gibson pinned the blame for such atrocities on "a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians" whose attacks on Christmas are to be the start of "a revolution against Christianity" itself.
Remember, we liberals have managed this much influence in opposition to the country's most popular holiday while being completely shut out of power in Washington. Imagine what we can do now that Democrats own the whole legislative branch.
Though an outright ban of Christmas would likely run afoul of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion, there are several laws Democrats could enact to make celebrating Christmas more difficult, if not altogether impossible. Here are some modest proposals: 1.) A 1,000 percent sales tax on wrapping paper and mistletoe, revenues from which will fund a commune of gay Wiccan avant garde cellists. 2.) We ban the sale of all Christmas records except for Terry Bradshaw Sings Christmas Songs for the Whole Family and the non-religious holiday music composed by the gay Wiccan cellists. We also ban television networks from showing such beloved classics as It's a Wonderful Life and The Christmas Story. The only holiday movies allowed on the air will be The Santa Clause 3 and Jingle All the Way . 3.) To get some bipartisan support from Republicans (in addition to the support of the Governator for suggestion number 2), we pass a bill allowing the timber industry cut down every evergreen tree in the country. We can also placate energy lobbyists by purchasing lumps of coal in bulk to give as presents to underprivileged children.
Taken together, these proposals could sound Christmas's death knell. The only question is whether the newly-elected Democratic majority has the political will to enact them. Some might argue that eliminating Christmas would be a tremendous waste of both the public's time and good will, and that Democrats should instead focus on implementing policies to raise the minimum wage or let the government negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. You know, things that might help people.
This argument is, to put it politely, a stinking pile of rubbish.
What many liberals and progressives don't seem to understand is that banning Christmas is the linchpin of our entire agenda. As Mr. O'Reilly once astutely noted,
the war on Christmas is "part of the secular-progressive agenda to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square" and pave the way for "secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, [and] gay marriage." When the man is right, he's right.
I for one understand that Christmas is the only thing standing between me and my lifelong dream of euthanizing my relatives, grabbing their inheritance, buying lots of drugs, getting a sex change, and marrying a lesbian. If Nancy Pelosi is as dedicated to her San Francisco values as the conservative media say she is, then she should put ending Christmas and subsidizing my lifestyle at the top of her legislative agenda. After all, if Speaker Pelosi decided to forsake destroying Christmas in favor other policies, it could signal that the right-wing punditocracy has been exaggerating the left's ambitions to abolish religion from the public square all along. And, really, what are the chances of that?
