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Matt Pearl, a University of Georgia student who a few months ago weighed in on the issue of torture, now looks at last year’s controversy over the “war against Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas� or “Happy Holidays�?
By Matt Pearl
Yep, I’m reopening this rotted-out chestnut to share some views.
We all remember last year… opting to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” somehow constituted a pervasive and horrifying attack on not only Christmas, but on Christianity as a whole. Talking heads on Fox News almost gleefully announced the coming of a “War on Christmas,” and those Christians who tend to vote Republican, including my then-girlfriend, ate up the rhetoric and asserted their dominance over the public discourse, deeming everything other than “Merry Christmas” to be an offensive abomination of the English language.
On the other side, pluralists decided that the term “Merry Christmas” its self was somehow offensive, and anything more specific than “Happy Holidays” was culturally insensitive and unacceptable.
Wal-Mart changed their seasonal greeting to “Happy Holidays”, and that first group of politically conservative Christians promptly boycotted. This year they changed back, and the same group found another reason to boycott (apparently Wal-Mart has some hand in the vast gay conspiracy that I am just now hearing about).
Now, there is no escaping the fact that that whole semantic fiasco centered around one goal: Cultural Dominance. Christianity, particularly that practiced by those who are politically conservative, is feeling threatened as the dominant force in our culture, and those Pluralists want to make sure that no toes are stepped on and that respect for all cultures, no matter how obscure, dominates the cultural mainstream.
However, both of these groups forget one thing: American Culture…
I’m not talking about what holidays we celebrate or how we greet each other during the month of December… No, I’m talking about, arguably, the most essential underlying concept in our legal and cultural lives. That concept is the freedom of speech.
Well, at least I think it still has that importance. More and more people are being persecuted for what they say. Wal-Mart and other chains get boycotted if they don’t pander specifically to Christians by saying “Merry Christmas,” Bill Maher asserts that suicide bombers are brave and he gets kicked off of network TV, Howard Stern gets kicked off traditional radio (though he likes satellite radio better), Kramer turns out to be a racist and goes into therapy, and a score of other careers have been ruined because Free Speech turned out to have a great price…
Alas, I digress…
It doesn’t matter to me what you say, to be perfectly honest. As long as you guys just greet me with the warmth that fills everyone during this season. If you mistake me for a practitioner a certain religion, I won’t care; if you don’t specifically mention my holiday in your greeting, I still won’t care…
I do have a message to both sides of the Christmas War:
Conservative Christians: Stop playing the victim… not specifically pandering to your holiday does not constitute oppression of you or your religion. It’s about time that you guys realized that you aren’t the only show in town anymore…
Liberal Pluralists: Let people say what they want; don’t force multiculturalism on anybody. As long as things aren’t said with malicious intent, they shouldn’t be considered to be offensive…
(Editor’s note: Use of the illustration graphic above does NOT mean that this site is calling for the elimination of Christmas.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.