The Canadian museum currently displaying an ancient box purported to be the ossuary of Jesus’ brother James is no longer using the Christian designations of B.C. and A.D. to mark the calendar, opting instead for more “modern and palatable” terms.

Royal Ontario Museum abandons Christian dating system for James ossuary

After a long internal debate, the Royal Ontario Museum has decided to change “anno Domini” – Latin for “in the year of our Lord” – to C.E., referring to the “common era.” It’s also shelving B.C. – “before Christ” – in favor of B.C.E. – “before the common era.”

According to the National Post of Canada, the intent of the change “is just to be more inclusive” in how years are described.

“A lot of people accept the reality of Jesus as a historical figure but don’t accept him as Christ, and to use the words ‘before Christ’ is really quite ethnocentric of European Christians,” Dan Rahimi, the museum’s director of collections management told the Post. “And to use ‘the year of our Lord’ is also quite insensitive to huge populations in Toronto who have other lords.”

The first exhibit to feature the new nomenclature is the James ossuary, a stone box believed to have contained the bones of James, brother of Jesus, the namesake of the dating system the museum is abandoning.

The ossuary is described in its display as dating between 50 and 70 C.E. A footnote explains that the two systems are identical, and the common-era style has been adopted because it is “current.”

The switch comes as the museum’s champion of the traditional style, paleozoologist Hans-Dieter Sues, leaves his post as director of collections and research.

Over the objections of most other curators, who fought for the common-era style, Sues mandated that the tradition not change, according to a museum spokesman. This week, Sues starts a new job as associate director for science and collections at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

For at least 10 years, curators have been pushing for a change to the common-era style in publicity material, according to the head of publicity, Francisco Alvarez.

“The only reason they haven’t is because Dr. Sues preferred not to,” Alvarez told the Post. “He’s now gone. ... So, starting really with the ossuary, it’s the first time that I’m aware of that we’re consistently using B.C.E. and C.E. over A.D. and B.C. I think that for a while, we’ll still need to always explain what it means, because people will tend to see it as a typo if they don’t already know the term.”

From his new office in Pittsburgh, Sues said that, in his experience, people often get “royally confused” when faced with the common-era style. “We have all grown up with B.C. and A.D.,” he said, according to the Post report.

Sues concedes the term is not of universal appeal, but said the politically correct solution is just as divisive. There is nothing particularly common about an era defined by the birth of Jesus, he said. Indeed, when the term was introduced centuries ago, “common” was meant to be synonymous with “Christian.”

“I would also argue that the new nomenclature doesn’t make any sense, because in non-Christian traditions, they have very different calendars,” Sues said.

“Even the Jewish calendar is quite different from our Christian, Gregorian calendar. Any major religion you can name outside Christianity has its own chronology.”

Even the date of Jesus’ own birth has been disputed for centuries, with many scholars asserting it took place between 4 and 7 B.C., in the autumn months.

Rahimi said he made a failed bid to change the style ten years ago when he was head of exhibits, and Sues nixed his second attempt two years ago.

==============================

The Fools: The outrage of political correctness on campus (National Review, 030401)

We already have a frontrunner for next year’s Campus Outrage Awards, also known as “Pollys,” given each spring by the Collegiate Network in recognition of “political correctness, curricular decay, [and] violations of academic freedom and free speech.” His name is Nicholas DeGenova, and last week this Columbia University professor wished “a million Mogadishus” upon U.S. troops in Iraq. That translates into 18 million dead American soldiers, most of them probably the same age as DeGenova’s undergraduate students.

The vile DeGenova will have to wait until next April Fools Day to pick up his Polly award. This year, however, he can congratulate his Columbia University colleague Gayatri Spivak for capturing a piece of first place in the sixth annual Polly awards by uttering this lovely sentiment: “Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for self and other.”

Columbia shares the first-place prize with Duke University, where domestic terrorist Laura Whitehorn, who spent 14 years in prison for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1983, informed students in a lecture, “It’s easy to do a bombing.”

The University of Mississippi earns a second-place Polly after announcing that the students responsible for scrawling racist graffiti on the dormitory doors of three black students would face “criminal charges, possibly a felony, or it could be a federal offense.” When it turned out that three black freshman were behind the incident, they were punished with “community service hours and therapeutic reflection papers.”

At Georgetown University, a death that was ruled a homicide by the D.C. Medical Officer compelled the administration to assign “a ten-page reflection paper” and counseling. For this outrage, Georgetown wins a third-place Polly.

The University of California at Berkeley won two Polly awards last year, and this year it shares a fourth-place Polly for channeling $9,000 in student fees to the UC Berkeley Queer Alliance, which maintains an online message board for students to “discuss campus locations where they can engage in illicit sexual activities.” The student code of conduct forbids behavior that “threatens the health of safety of any person,” and yet the administration has done nothing to rein in the Queer Alliance.

Speaking of health, Cornell University’s Gannett Health Center now sells vibrators to students. One school official says the decision represents “a commitment to affirming women’s sexuality.” This commitment also earns a tie for the fourth-place Polly.

Finally, the fifth-place Polly goes to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where professor Martha Lamb was pressured to resign her job after she used a racial epithet to describe a specific situation in historical context.

“We created the Campus Outrage Awards to expose the excesses of college administrators and professors who misuse their authority to silence dissent and impose their own political agendas on unwilling students,” says Collegiate Network president T. Kenneth Cribb.

The Collegiate Network is a consortium of 80 student-run newspapers on college campuses, and it is a division of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

==============================

Polly Folly: The latest from the PC campus (National Review, 020401)

The University of California at Berkeley won two of five “Polly” awards today for outrageous political correctness, in the fifth annual competition sponsored by the Collegiate Network (CN) “to highlight the noxious tendencies of radical faculty and students at the nation’s colleges.”

Berkeley’s first award came for a case of what the CN calls “multicultural hooliganism”: In February, a group of left-wing students broke into the office of The Patriot, a conservative student newspaper, and stole its entire press run, valued at $2,000. Editors who filed a police report were then met with death threats. The incident apparently was occasioned by a Patriot article critical of a radical Hispanic group, MEChA, which calls for the revolutionary liberation of the “bronze continent for bronze people.” The Berkeley chapter of MEChA receives $20,000 from the university.

Berkeley’s other award was for its now-famous sex-education class, which featured “an orgy at a class party and [a visit to] a strip club, where [students] watched an instructor have sex onstage.”

Tufts University won a Polly in the aftermath of activists stealing 4,000 copies of The Primary Source, a conservative students newspaper, and attacking its editor, Sam Dangremond. He filed charges with the campus police, “but when the school judicial committee heard the case, it ignored policy testimony, which stated that the leftists admitted to attacking Dangremond. The leftists were sentenced to probation. Two of the guilty leftists appealed their verdict of probation. They won, beat the rap, and were released with a warning.”

San Diego State University and the University of North Carolina shared a Polly for what the CN calls “anti-American events.” SDSU put an Ethiopian student, Zewdalem Kebede, on probation for arguing with Saudi Arabian students who “were happy about the [September 11] attacks” and “expressed sorrow that the terrorists missed the White House.” The Saudis made their remarks in Arabic, a language Kebede also knows. He confronted them, saying, “How do you feel happy when those 5,000 people are buried in two or three buildings?” Kebede later received a letter from SDSU’s Center for Student Rights accusing him of being verbally abusive and was put on probation.

UNC’s share of the award was for a teach-in organized by the Progressive Faculty Network after the terrorist massacres of last year. A moderator introduced the forum this way: “Understanding the attacks on the United States must include an understanding of different kinds of attacks — attacks not only by unknown or suspected terrorists, but attacks by us on ourselves. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence.”

The final Polly went to the University of Pittsburgh, where the gay group Rainbow Alliance “sponsored a lecture and demonstration on the use of sex toys.” The student government allocated $1,200 in student fees to pay for last November’s event.

“Many administrators and faculty deny that political correctness exists,” says Kenneth Cribb Jr., president of the CN. “Here’s proof to the contrary.”

The Collegiate Network, a project of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is a consortium of alternative student newspapers. It awards the Pollys every April Fools’ Day, even though they’re no joke.

==============================

The PCspeak Of Diversity (Foxnews, 030708)

The Supreme Court recently ruled that universities could favor minority students for admission as long as no race was automatically favored.

The ambiguous decision might seem to encourage open discussion but political correctness sometimes seems determined that debate will not occur. PCspeak, like Newspeak in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, forms an effective barrier.

In Orwell’s dystopian world, Oceania, Newspeak serves the ideological goals of Ingsoc — English Socialism. It gradually replaces Oldspeak in defining politics and culture. Without the words necessary, complex thoughts simply cannot be expressed.

The evolution of PCspeak parallels that of Newspeak. Consider the evolution of public debate on affirmative action or, more broadly, “diversity.”

First, there is the introduction of doublethink. Doublethink occurs when someone simultaneously accepts two contradictory beliefs as true. A common argument for affirmative action: It is wrong to judge people on the basis of skin color or gender; therefore, universities and employers should give preference to people based on skin color and gender.

Second, euphemistic “doublespeak” makes doublethink positions acceptable. The term “affirmative action” strongly implies a positive and correct action.

Third, language is controlled to define the ensuing debate. This is accomplished by various means, including:

1. Embedding new terms. Some of the words embedded into the diversity issue are “ethnocentric,” “heteronormativity” “gender-specific,” and “patriarchal oppression.” Their implications are not always obvious and sometimes run counter to intuition. In 1984, dissidents are sent to labor camps called JoyCamps. In modern universities, students are often required to attend so-called “sensitivity training,” which is a re-education process that includes public ridicule and humiliation for whites and males because of their race and sex.

2. Reducing the number of words. In 1984 , six words — arguably one word modified five times — describe the entire span of right to wrong, good to evil. They are good, plusgood, doubleplusgood, ungood, plusungood, and doubleplusungood. Affirmative action uses two basic categories to describe who is oppressed and deserving of legal privileges versus who is oppressive and deserving of legal barriers: minorities and non-minorities.

Again, “minority” is a misleading word. Women are minorities despite being a statistical majority. Hispanics are a minority while those of Celtic descent, like me, are in the “majority.” These two categories obliterate such subtleties and describe the entire span of oppressed to oppressor.

3. Eliminating “wrong” words and, thus, wrong ideas. In 1984 , all literature was being rewritten in Newspeak so that authors such as Shakespeare either disappeared or were re-interpreted to serve Ingsoc’s purposes. Today, a school textbook review process is being conducted on a national level to eliminate non-PC words and ideas. Accuracy is a secondary consideration. Allegedly improper gender terms like “Founding Fathers” are changed to proper ones like “Framers.” American Indians no longer are described as wearing braids, although many tribes did. Inconvenient people become “unpersons” in Orwell’s world; inconvenient history becomes “unideas” in ours.

4. Changing the remaining words. Some words are simplified out of existence. In 1984, the word “free” is used only in its simplest form — e.g. my sweater is free of lint. Complex usage, such as “political freedom,” does not exist. Thus, the concept of “political freedom” does not exist. Other words are gutted and inverted. Consider the current usage of “diversity” in PCspeak. PC diversity tolerates no dissent on issues such as race but mandates its conclusions through laws like affirmative action. It imposes de facto quotas for one sex, not the other. It demonizes and academically silences “wrong” culture such as those expressing Western values.

Ask yourself a question similar to that Orwell posed to his readers. Using Newspeak — or pure PCspeak — would it be possible to write the following passage?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government ...”

Then imagine Patrick Henry proclaiming, “Give Me Doubleplusgoodness or Give Me Death!”

If some voices were still able to argue effectively against PC diversity, then the final stage of controlling language could be implemented: punishing those who dissent. Dissenters could be called hate-filled and a danger to society. Their objections could become hate crimes punishable by law.

A recent tax-funded study in Canada suggested legally prosecuting men’s advocacy sites, including U.S. ones, under Canadian hate speech law even though such sites are usually more innocuous than many feminist ones. In 1984, dissent is called “crimethink.” We call it hate speech.

The villain of 1984 proclaims, “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” He concludes, “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

It is time to reclaim the richness of the English language ... verb by verb, adjective by adjective. PC advocates must recognize that syllables are not vessels of evil, words should not be the focus of law and disagreement is no crime.

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She lives with her husband in Canada.

==============================

No “Christmas” (National Review, 031208)

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when “Merry Christmas” seems practically verboten, and everything is “holiday,” “holiday,” “holiday.” The Capitol Hill Christmas tree is officially called the Capitol Hill Holiday Tree. Gag me with a spoon, as people used to say, way back when.

A reader sent me something treasurable, and typical. He quoted a memorandum of his company, which said, “[Company X] observes the following holidays.” Listed then were “New Year’s Day,” “Presidents’ Day,” “Memorial Day,” “July 4th/Independence Day,” “Labor Day,” “Thanksgiving and the Day After,” and, get this, “December 25th.” The company couldn’t bring itself to utter the C-word. Maybe they thought it was unconstitutional or something. We’re lucky that they actually said “Thanksgiving,” as I have noticed — and remarked in Impromptus — that Thanksgiving is being replaced by “holiday,” too.

==============================

Taking ‘Christmas’ Out of Holiday Jingles (Foxnews, 031211)

BETHEL, Wash. — A music teacher’s decision to replace “Christmas” with “winter” in a recent concert carol has many residents up in arms.

Music teacher Mark Denison of Clover Creek Elementary School in Bethel, Wash., changed the lyrics in Dale Wood’s “Carol from an Irish Cabin” to read: “The harsh wind blows down from the mountains and blows a white winter to me,” reported the News Tribune.

Parent Darla Dowell, whose 7-year-old daughter sang the song, told the Tribune the decision was “absurd.”

“I think the most important thing that angers me is that they sent a message to my child that there’s something wrong with Christmas and saying Christmas and celebrating it and performing it at her school with her peers,” Dowell told Fox News.

She couldn’t understand why it’s okay to exclude Christmas when her daughter still sang Hanukkah tunes that included lyrics about the “mighty miracle” of Israel’s ancient days. In that song, there were at least six mentions of the Jewish holiday.

School officials admitted Denison may have gone too far in trying not to offend some people but they still backed him up.

“The policy for our school district is to include both sacred and secular music,” school district spokesman Mark Wenzel told Fox News. “We leave it to the individual music teacher to decide what music to choose. It’s supposed to have some sort of learning value.”

Most school districts in the region, including Bethel’s, allow both religious and secular songs to be performed during the holidays. Students at other schools in the district are still singing both types of songs, Mike Sander, director of arts education, told the Tribune.

The policies of allowing both types of music comes from court rulings that say holiday traditions can be taught if the purpose is to provide secular instruction rather than promoting religion, the Tribune reported. No court has ever ruled that mention of the word “Christmas” in a public school violates the idea of separation of church and state.

Clover Creek officials said students could get confused if the lyrics are changed back to the original version after having practiced the new version for a month. When some second graders were asked whether they wanted to keep in the word “winter” or use “Christmas,” a slim majority voted for “winter.”

“They’re making no attempt to fix the situation,” Dowell told the Tribune.

But no such vote was taken on the Hanukkah song.

Dowell and a handful of other parents pulled their kids out of the performance.

“Crossing out the word Christmas is just kind of like spitting on God,” student Sheyenne Dowell told Fox News.

But the word “Christmas” did get slipped into one song that was performed — in Benjamin Hanby’s song, “Up on the Housetop.” Dowell argued that school officials are contradicting themselves.

“I’ve never made a stink about anything in my life,” she told the Tribune. “But I feel very strongly about this.”

In the meantime, similar whitewash controversies are brewing around the country.

In New York City, there’s a lawsuit challenging the district’s policy of encouraging schools to display menorahs and the Islamic crescent and star, while prohibiting Nativity scenes.

In New Jersey, a school board eliminated all religious music from school programs.

And in Kansas, a school district buckled under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union and did away with its yearly visit from Santa. All this despite a Fox News poll recently released that showed 96% of Americans celebrate Christmas, which could mean all Grinches, beware.

“Some of it is actually animated by a hostility to Christianity,” said syndicated talk show host Dennis Prager. “There’s no question about it. But let’s be very clear — if this country drops its Christianity we are doomed. This is a Judeo-Christian values-based culture.”

==============================

NFL backs off on fine for cross hat (WorldNetDaily, 040206)

Quarterback penalized for unapproved faith-based apparel

The National Football League has decided a Cincinnati Bengals quarterback will not have to pay a $5,000 fine for wearing a hat during interviews that features a Christian cross symbol.

Jon Kitna routinely wears the cap to signify his faith, but only league apparel can be worn during interviews immediately following games, an attempt by the NFL to protect its sponsorship deals.

An NFL spokesman told the Associated Press the league rescinded the fine before Kitna’s appeal could be heard, but he gave no explanation for the decision.

Kitna told the AP he believed the league rule applied only to products with a competing company’s logo or name.

“All along, there was never any malicious intent on my part,” he said yesterday. “I don’t think they ever intended for the fine to stick.”

The wire service said religious stores around Cincinnati reacted to the fine by selling hundreds of similar caps to fans who supported Kitna.

Supporters around the country sent Kitna money to help pay the fine, and a local businessman said he would pay the $5,000 and every fine that followed if the quarterback continued to wear the hat.

After the fine, however, Kitna stopped wearing the hat for postgame interviews. He also has returned the money to fans with a personal note of thanks.

Kitna was the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year, leading his team into playoff contention until the final week of the season.

According to a news report this week, former NFL Most Valuable Player Kurt Warner said his Christian faith was directly assaulted by his own NFL coaches who purportedly said his Bible reading was hurting his on-field performance.

Warner was the MVP of Super Bowl XXXIV, but when his performance began to falter in recent seasons, he was told his benching to backup service resulted – at least partially – from his belief in Jesus.

“I actually had [Rams] coaches say I was reading the Bible too much and it was taking away from my play,” Warner told the Baptist Press. “It was OK when we were winning, but now I was [messing] this thing up? People were saying I had lost my job because of my faith.”

==============================

Super Bowl MVP told Bible is harmful (WorldNetDaily, 040205)

Coaches said star quarterback’s game suffered due to Christian belief

The Most Valuable Player from the Super Bowl four years ago says his faith as a Christian was directly assaulted by his own NFL coaches who purportedly said his Bible reading was hurting his on-field performance.

Kurt Warner was a hero for the St. Louis Rams as he led his team to victory in Super Bowl XXXIV, becoming the only quarterback in championship history to complete more than 400 yards passing in the title game.

But when his performance started to suffer at the beginning of this past season, he was told his benching to backup service resulted – at least partially – from his belief in Jesus.

Warner says the bias didn’t surface when the Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans 23-16 in the 2000 Super Bowl.

“We were talking in our [team] Bible study about how we were going to honor God if we got to that final game,” he told BP. “When I was on that stage after the game and I was asked first about a touchdown pass, I just said first things first, ‘Thank you Jesus.’”

According to the report, Warner says his lackluster performance this season has taught him more about his faith than any of his Super Bowl highs.

“You want to say, ‘God, how could You allow this to happen?’” he said. “I thought I was over the fact of being a backup. It was such a shock, but God has allowed me to use this greater platform for Him.

“If you can stand up for your faith when you’re on top, you can stand up for it now that you’re at the bottom.”

==============================

Macy’s stores boycotted for replacing ‘Christmas’ (WorldNetDaily, 041201)

Effort punishes ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ icon, claims chain offending millions of customers

Immortalized in a 1947 Christmas movie classic, Macy’s is now the focus of a boycott campaign protesting the department-store chain’s replacement of “Merry Christmas” with politically correct greetings.

A group called the Committee to Save Merry Christmas says Macy’s and its umbrella Federated Department Stores have ignored several requests that “Merry Christmas” signs be returned and that its advertising acknowledge the time-honored phrase.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for a corporation to make tens of millions of dollars selling Christmas presents, yet coldly refuse to acknowledge Christmas,” said the group’s chairman, Manuel Zamorano, in a statement. “What’s the holiday all about, anyway? Politically correct phases like ‘Seasons Greetings’ and ‘Happy Holidays’ are no substitute for the real thing.”

Macy’s was featured in “Miracle on 34th Street,” the Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood film set in the department store’s celebration of Christmas. The flagship store in New York also is famous for its elaborate Christmas-season window displays.

Zamorano says Macy’s and its affiliated stores have been “systematically” removing references to “Merry Christmas” over the past several years.

“This is offensive to the sensibilities of millions of average Americans,” he said. “Eliminating ‘Merry Christmas’ is plain wrong. It’s time to remove Macy’s and Federated from the Christmas shopping list.”

Federated Department Stores, Inc., operates more than 450 stores in 34 states under names such as Bloomingdale’s, Bon-Macy’s, Burdines-Macy’s, Goldsmiths-Macy’s, Lazarus-Macy’s and Rich’s Macy’s.

Zamorano, a Sacramento, Calif., media consultant, expects his campaign to take several years before it gets results.

One year ago, he wrote to Federated’s then-chairman, James Zimmerman, saying he hoped a boycott could be avoided.

“We find this to be personally, culturally and traditionally offensive when it is known by everyone your company actively solicits our patronage and purchasing of gifts for the Christmas celebration, and now refuses to acknowledge Christmas in your stores,” Zamorano wrote.

The boycott was launched in May when new Chairman Terry Lundgren did not respond to a follow-up letter.

A Macy’s spokeswoman did not return WND’s call requesting comment, but the company told Citizen magazine earlier this year it believed Zamorano had unfairly singled out Federated, because other stores have the same practice.

==============================

District bans instrumental Christmas carols (WorldNetDaily, 041117)

Songs with religious references barred, even without lyrics

A school district’s long-standing policy banning Christmas songs with religious references is under scrutiny after officials clarified that it includes the prohibition of the performance of instrumental numbers without lyrics.

Instead of tunes about Jesus, and even Santa Claus, the 40-member Columbia High School brass ensemble will be limited for the first time to seasonal selections such as “Winter Wonderland” and “Frosty the Snowman,” the Newark Star-Ledger reported.

Some parents of students in the South Orange/Maplewood School District in New Jersey are perplexed, including Eric Chabrow, whose son plays saxophone in the ensemble.

“There needs to be safeguards in school,” Chabrow told the Newark paper. “But musical notes don’t sanction religion.”

Superintendent Peter P. Horoschak explained the brass ensemble’s Christmas carols have slipped under the radar since the policy was adopted in the 1990s. A few have complained about it, he said, and this year the district is trying to be proactive.

“Rather than try to respond to all the various religions and try to balance them, it’s best to stay away from that and simply have a nonreligious tone to them and have more of a seasonal tone,” he told the Star-Ledger.

Rabbi Jehiel Orenstein of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, N.J., said instrumental renditions of religious holiday songs are fine as long as everyone is included.

“I love music,” he told the Star-Ledger. “There are overtones to instrumental music. I just want to make sure it’s inclusive, then we don’t leave anyone out.”

The New Jersey School Boards Association said its sample policy allows for performance of songs from various ethnic or religious groups as a way of broadening students’ awareness, but districts are free to impose tighter restrictions.

“The law will permit a school-sponsored event to have religious music as long as it does not dominate the program, is not being used to promote religion and is presented for educational purposes to teach,” Frank Belluscio, spokesman for the organization, told the Star-Ledger.

The South Orange/Maplewood policy was clarified in an Oct. 29 memo by Nicholas Santoro, the chair of the district’s Fine Arts Department, who said songs such as “Winter Wonderland” or “Frosty the Snowman” are acceptable.

“Music centered on peace is also a nice touch,” he wrote, according to the Newark daily.

The memo also states that printed programs for holiday concerts “must avoid graphics which refer to the holidays, such as Christmas trees and dreidels.”

The newspaper interviewed Ellen Relkin of Maplewood, N.J., a parent of three children in the district who said the policy might be “a little excessive” but worries that people who don’t observe Christmas, such as Jews and Hindus, might feel left out of the school activity.

==============================

Denver Mayor Will Not Remove ‘Christmas’ (Foxnews, 041203)

DENVER — Seeking to avoid an emotionally charged battle, Mayor John Hickenlooper has reversed a decision to remove the lighted phrase “Merry Christmas” from the holiday display on the roof of the City and County Building.

Hickenlooper said his office was flooded with complaints after saying he would remove the message next year and replace it with the inclusive “Happy Holidays.”

“I didn’t even think twice about it, and it’s perhaps my inexperience as an elected official,” said Hickenlooper, who took office in summer 2003. “To have it veer off in this other direction, where so many people felt being deprived of this tradition, was certainly not what we intended. It was so far from any of my intentions that it’s easy for me to apologize.”

He said the city might add “Happy Holidays” to the display next year.

Separately, the Downtown Denver Partnership, a private nonprofit that organizes the city’s 30-year-old Parade of Lights, is sticking with its longstanding policy that prohibits religious or political messages in the parade.

The group was inundated with complaints over its decision months ago to reject a Christmas-themed float proposed by Faith Bible Chapel for the parade, scheduled Friday and Saturday. Pastor George Morrison of the 4,000-member church told Denver newspapers about the rejection earlier this week.

Business group president Jim Basey on Thursday apologized to anyone who was offended, and pledged to review the no-religion policy after this year’s parade.

“We are committed to being inclusive and making sure downtown is everyone’s downtown,” said parade director Susan Rogers Kark.

Morrison dismissed Basey’s apology as “sidestepping the issue,” but agreed to meet with him after the parade.

Members of Faith Bible Chapel and several other large churches are expected to line the parade route, singing Christmas carols and handing out cocoa, as a protest.

==============================

Onward Christian soldiers (Washington Times, 041209)

“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” — I Corinthians 13

Americans began the unholy trend in 1962, when prayer in public schools was outlawed. In the 1970s, American women began looking for Mr. Goodbar and men began turning inward to avoid being victimized by Superwomen. Post Roe v. Wade, sexed-up America and hedonism led to abortion-mania, abandoned babies and neglected children. Schools no longer celebrated Christmas or Easter, or even mentioned the words — lest they risk being labeled Bible thumpers. Don’t even think about tossing bills into Salvation Army kettles at Target or shopping malls run by Kimco Realty — because the bell-ringing Christian soldiers are not welcome.

No surprise, then, by this headline in Thursday’s editions of The Washington Times: “U.S communities fail to keep ‘Christ’ in Christmas.”

Bah humbug.

As the article pointed out, some people even consider saying the seasonal phrase “Merry Christmas” a blasphemy. What it is is anti-Christian.

“School districts in Florida and New Jersey,” the article said, “have banned Christmas carols altogether, and an ‘all-inclusive’ holiday song program at a Chicago-area elementary school included Jewish and Jamaican songs, but no Christmas carols.”

With so many PC groups on the prowl these days, you never know what’s next on the list. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to learn that the “PC smotherers” want to ban the word “holiday” itself (holy + day) or take “Santa” (saint) out of Santa Claus.

Blessedly, these and other anti-Christian efforts give rise to groups like the God Squad, do-gooders based in Chicago who defy the American Jewish Congress, American Atheists and (God forbid) the American Civil Liberties Union and build a nativity scene in the Windy City. Another group, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which is based in Arizona, issued a legal primer regarding the public square and Christmas. It cites, the article said, “court decisions made from 1963 to 2004 that neutralize the notion the U.S. Constitution requires government officials to eliminate public mention of Christmas.”

As Greg Scott of ADF said: “The fact is 96% of us celebrate Christmas. For a small minority to force their way and their will on the public majority is unconscionable ... people are tired of efforts to sanitize religious expression. This policy against even instrumental Christmas music in schools violates common sense and is neither necessary nor constitutional.”

Indeed, someone somewhere is always going to be offended by something — whether that something is religious in nature or not.

Religious liberty means precisely that: You are free to worship, pray or sing praises to the Almighty and, conversely, you are free not to.

The anti-Christianites take on the ridiculous. A principal in Kirkland, Wash., (population 45,000), lowered the curtain on a production of the classic “A Christmas Carol” because feeble Tiny Tim says, “God bless us everyone.” Other communities condemn the term “Christmas” trees and instead refer to them as “community” trees. It ain’t the same.

Trying to please all of the people all of the time is impossible. Trying to please the “speech-code fascists,” particularly those who are acting un-Christianlike, produces a never-ending stream of lawsuits, apologies and excuses. Target, for example, banned the Salvation Army’s red-kettle program because of requests from other nonprofits. How uncharitable of Target’s executives.

The Salvation Army is my favorite charity. I take my from wallet and give to them because, like the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army doesn’t play politics, and helps anyone and everyone. The Army’s substance-abuse treatment programs are among the most successful in the nation. But do you know what’s truly remarkable? What is now the Salvation Army began as the evangelist mission of William Booth in London in 1852 to aid the least, the last and the lost. After all these years, the Salvation Army remains a faithful guiding light.

I guess I’ll have to put Target, Best Buy, Circuit City and some other retailers on my naughty list, and spend my Christmas dollars elsewhere.

Perhaps I’ll visit Wal-Mart in search of a CD with Kate Smith singing, as only Kate Smith could, “God Bless America” or Billie Holiday with a soul-stirring rendition of “God Bless the Child.” And while I’m at Wal-Mart, I can tip my wallet to a red kettle and toss a smile to the Salvation Army bell ringers for faithfully reminding us of the reason for the season. God bless them and the work they do in His name.

==============================

Schools prohibit Christmas colors (WorldNetDaily, 041215)

District targeted with lawsuit after officials require white-only supplies for ‘winter’ party

First it was schools that banned the singing of Christmas carols.

Then another banned carols played only by instruments with no lyrics being presented.

Now a school district has banned the colors red and green from a “Winter Break Party,” requiring parents to bring only white plates and napkins.

In response to the party policy, as well as many other rules a group of parents and students believe to be rank censorship, a lawsuit has been filed against the Plano Independent School District in Texas to fight back against its “religious hostility,” as one attorney puts it.

Other policies cited in the suit, filed today in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Sherman Division, include a ban on candy cane distribution when a religious card is attached, a ban on parents giving religious-oriented items to one another on school property and a ban on criticizing school board members or administrators on campus.

“This lawsuit includes a large amount of evidence that demonstrates the pervasive religious hostitlity in Plano ISD,” said Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for Liberty Legal Institute, which, along with Alliance Defense Fund, is representing about 20 clients in the suit.

Kelly Shackelford, Liberty Legal Institute’s chief counsel, noted the suit was purposely filed before Friday, when the white-only Winter Break party is scheduled to occur.

“We asked for a temporary restraining order today to provide protection by this Friday,” he told WorldNetDaily.

Shackelford says if the order is issued by Friday, at the party the students would be allowed to pass out religious items, parents would be able to do the same, and the ban on criticizing school officials would be lifted.

“These policies are a blatant violation of religious freedom and free speech,” he said. “These are school officials who have lost all common sense.”

One item included in the suit is the case of a girl student who was forbidden to invite her friends to an Easter event at her church, according to the law firm.

“We’ve even got a mom who went to the school asking if her daughter at her birthday party could hand out a pencil with ‘Jesus’ on it,” Shackelford told WND, “and the principal got so upset with her that he called the police.

“It’s just unbelievable stuff. We’ve been collecting these things for a year or two. This is a pervasive, district-wide problem of political correctness in the extreme.”

Shackelford said the families’ attorneys worked with the district’s attorney, Richard Abernathy, to try to get the officials to back down on some of the policies, but they did not.

“We filed the federal lawsuit hopefully to put an end to all this nonsense,” Shackelford said.

Shackelford said he didn’t mind if the district engaged in its “silly pretense” that there is no Christmas, but he says it cannot violate the rights of students and parents in the process.

Said Shackelford: “There’s a huge difference between the school putting a sign out that says, ‘We endorse Jesus,’ and telling students and parents that they can’t live out their faith.”

Commenting on the white-only policy for party supplies, Shackeford quipped, “I guess nobody has told them white could symbolize the purity of Christ. They’d probably ban white!”

He says parents have been verbally told the reason for the color restriction was to shun traditional Christmas red and green. Last week, a note went home with students asking parents to bring certain items for the party. Two items listed that some were asked to supply were: “One package small white plates” and “One package white napkins.”

Food being requested included a dozen sugar cookies and a bag of Hersey’s kisses. Liberty Legal Institute says the parents were told not to include any colored icing on the cookies, while Alliance Defense Fund reports children were told not to wear red and green clothing to the party.

Shackelford said the complaint is over 150 pages – “just fact after fact.”

“We are confident that the courts will uphold the fundamental law that school officials may not suppress or exclude the speech of citizens simply because their speech is religious or includes religious content,” Shackelford said.

Gary McCaleb is senior counsel with Alliance Defense Fund.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that public schools must prohibit the distribution of candy canes or Christmas cards,” he said in a statement. “They have never ruled that you can’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ in the public schools. These attempts to stifle all religious expression and sanitize Christmas of all religious content are tiring to the overwhelming majority of Texans and all Americans.”

==============================

Night of caroling won’t be silenced (Washington Times, 041220)

A Republican in the blue state of New Jersey is bucking what some decry as a national trend to eradicate all traces of religion in public places.

Steve Lonegan, who is running for the Republican nomination for New Jersey governor, is defying a school-district edict that bans religious music from holiday-season celebrations this year.

Mr. Lonegan has asked local residents of all religions to join him at 5 p.m. tomorrow “to sing and listen to” songs such as George Frederick Handel’s “Messiah” and “Silent Night,” which have been banned from schools, even in instrumental form, by the South Orange/Maplewood School District.

Residents will sing and hear Christmas, Hanukkah and other music outside Columbia High School, where students and parents will assemble later that night for the school’s official holiday concert.

“The school district’s decision to prohibit even instrumental versions of classic Christmas tunes shows that those who claim to speak for tolerance are, in fact, the most intolerant,” Mr. Lonegan said.

“It’s time people lighten up and enjoy the Christmas and Hanukkah season, instead of denying the religious foundation of our nation and the holiday season,” said Mr. Lonegan, who is mayor of Bogota, a small town across the Hudson River from New York.

In a Dec. 6 statement, school board President Brian O’Leary said the ban is intended “to balance the important roles that religion and music can and do play in our curriculum with a desire to avoid celebrating or appearing to celebrate a religious holiday.”

He added that “religious music, like any other music, can only be used if it achieves specific goals of the music curriculum.”

Mr. Lonegan said his purpose in organizing the sing-along is “to send the South Orange/Maplewood Board of Education and others who will deny our religious heritage a message that we’re not going to let them take God out of our public life.”

Tom Wilson, the New Jersey Republican Party chairman, seconds that notion, saying that “some of the greatest works of art were commissioned by religious institutions and leaders, including much of the music we come to associate with a traditional time of year.”

The planned demonstration comes at a time when the annual battles over Nativity scenes and other Christmas-season displays are including counterattacks from a religiously motivated public against those who seek to cleanse the public sphere of religious symbols.

•Voters in Mustang, Okla., incensed over a superintendent’s decision to remove a Nativity scene from an elementary-school Christmas program took out their anger at the ballot box. A bond measure worth nearly $11 million failed, getting 55% of the vote on Dec. 14, short of the 60% needed.

•A privately funded Nativity scene in a public park in Milford, Conn., was the target of a demonstration yesterday by the group American Atheists. However, only four members of the group showed up, Fox News reported yesterday, while about 100 people carried signs and demonstrated in favor of the creche. Milford resident Robert Jones lamented to Fox News that “we can’t say Christ in public; we can’t say Christmas in public; we can’t say God in public.”

Mr. Wilson sees what he considers an absurd disconnect between the New Jersey school board’s actions and American cultural practice, affirmed by the same Fox poll that said 96% of Americans say they celebrate Christmas, a larger number than those who profess to be Christians.

“Just because a song refers to a religious figure doesn’t make it a religious song,” says Mr. Wilson. “Nor does some 10-year-old blowing it on a flute make it a religious statement.”

According to demographic studies, the United States is not only a religious nation, but is predominantly Christian.

A 2001 survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York that sampled 50,281 American adults found that 77.5% of Americans consider themselves to be Christians, 14% follow no organized religion, 1.3% are Jewish, 0.5% are Muslim, 0.5% are Buddhist and 0.4% are Hindu.

As far back as 1892, in Church of the Holy Trinity vs. United States, the Supreme Court ruled: “We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.” In 1952, the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “We are a religious people and our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

In a Fox News telephone poll of 900 persons, conducted Dec. 3-4 by Opinion Dynamics Corp., 87% said they supported Nativity scenes on public grounds, with 9% opposed and 4% not sure. The poll’s margin of error is 3%age points.

The ban by the South Orange/Maplewood School District prompted David Hinckley, the “critic at large” for the New York Daily News, to write that the school district “is trying to take Christ out of Christmas, or at least out of Christmas music.”

Mr. Hinckley notes that the prohibition “doesn’t just mean the choir can’t sing ‘Adeste Fideles.’ It means the band can’t play an instrumental ‘Silent Night,’ which is apparently considered too evocative.”

Mr. Hinckley said the ban was “silly” but newsworthy only because “it’s unusual, not because it’s becoming a norm.”

He decried “the way some commentators are waving it around as evidence that a large crowd of secularist liberals is trying to throw all God-fearing Christians over the side of the American ship.”

But Mr. Wilson, the Republican chairman, said the school board’s ban is exactly that — another example of a larger trend, citing a federal court’s order, later reversed on a technicality by the Supreme Court, to take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

“What next?” he said. “Banning Halloween because it’s based on All Saints Day?”

Or will the next move, he asked rhetorically, be to stop the Supreme Court from opening its sessions with the clerk saying, as he now does, “God save the United States and this honorable court.”

==============================

Black minister: Say ‘no’ to Kwanzaa (WorldNetDaily, 041221)

Calls on blacks to celebrate Christmas, reject artificial holiday

Blacks should be outraged by attempts to stamp out Christianity from Christmas celebrations while accepting Kwanzaa as mainstream, says a black minister.

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of BOND, Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, and author of WND Books’ “Scam,” notes that while public school administrators and city officials attempt to ban nativity scenes, Christmas carols, candy canes and even Christmas trees from public places, Kwanzaa has been accepted as mainstream.

While commonly viewed as an “African” holiday, observed from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, Kwanzaa actually was created in the U.S. in 1966 by Dr. Maulana “Ron” Karenga, the head of a violent black-power group, United Slaves Organization, which was a rival to the Black Panthers.

In the 1970s, Karenga served four years in prison for conspiracy and assault in the torture of two female followers. Karenga was convicted of whipping them with electrical cords and beating them with a karate baton after stripping them naked. He placed in the mouth of one of the victims a hot soldering iron, also scarring her face with the device. He put one of her big toes in a vise, and detergent and running water in both of their mouths.

In a 1978 interview quoted in the Washington Post, Karenga said, “People think it’s African, but it’s not. I came up with Kwanzaa because black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying.”

Peterson points out Kwanzaa is taught in public schools, recognized by corporations and was saluted in a proclamation by President Bush in 2002.

“If black Christians don’t stand up for Christmas and reject Kwanzaa, they are allowing evil to have its way,” Peterson said. “They will regret using a fake holiday to stamp out the true meaning of Christmas.”

==============================

Anti-Christmas district hit with federal lawsuit (WorldNetDaily, 041220)

School officials banned carols, even for instrumental groups

The New Jersey school district that banned Christmas music, even by instrumental groups, from its holiday concerts has been hit with a lawsuit claiming officials have demonstrated hostility toward religion.

Thomas More Law Center filed a federal lawsuit Friday on behalf of Michael Stratechuk and his two children, who are students in the South Orange/Maplewood School District. According to a statement from Thomas More, the suit claims the district’s action is unconstitutional.

As WorldNetDaily reported, this year the district expanded its no-Christmas music policy to include instrumental music. Instead of tunes about Jesus, and even Santa Claus, the 40-member Columbia High School brass ensemble will be limited for the first time to seasonal selections such as “Winter Wonderland” and “Frosty the Snowman.” The group’s holiday concert is scheduled for tomorrow night.

“This is another example of the anti-Christmas, anti-religion policy infecting our public-school system,” said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the law center, in a statement. “The Constitution does not require our public schools to become religion-free zones. Forcing students to strip all religious content from music is like asking them to study art history while excluding paintings from the Renaissance because they contain religious subjects.”

The civil-rights lawsuit argues that the school district’s total ban on religious music conveys the “impermissible, government-sponsored message of disapproval of and hostility toward religion.” The lawsuit further argues that because the religious music is banned from the public schools, students are denied the ability to learn about and listen to music that has influenced the social, cultural and historic development of civilization.

Last week, WND reported that Bogota, N.J., Mayor Steve Lonegan, a Republican candidate for governor, has organized what he calls an “illegal” night of caroling tomorrow before the Columbia High School concert to draw attention to the school district’s ban. Lonegan has invited his rivals to join him outside the school to sing songs that were deleted from the concert’s program.

==============================

Jerusalem Distributes Free Christmas Trees to Christians (CNSNews, 041223)

The city of Jerusalem distributed free Christmas trees to Christians on Thursday as part of a longstanding tradition.

For decades, Israel has distributed the trees free of charge, particularly to the ex-patriot community of Christian leaders, journalists, diplomats and others.

One observer quipped that the Jewish State is probably the only country in the world that gives away free Christmas trees to Christians.

It is “symbolic of the way Jerusalem unites all three monotheistic religions,” said Jerusalem municipality spokesman Gideon Schmerling in a statement.

The trees are donated by the Jewish National Fund, which is the country’s forestry agency.

“Every year we distribute about 1,200 Christmas trees to religious leaders from different churches, diplomats, U.N. representatives, U.N. peacekeepers and the foreign press,” said Paul Ginsberg, head of the forestry department of northern Israel.

“We also make trees available for sale for the Christian Arab population,” Ginsberg told the Cybercast News Service. Between one thousand and fifteen hundred trees are sold each year.

“Because we’re the only official forestry agency in Israel, we feel responsible to sections of the population to provide them with a service they require,” he said.

According to Ginsberg, the most popular variety is the Arizona Cyprus, which looks the closest to a “normal Christmas tree,” has a fairly dense number of branches and a greenish-gray color.

Most trees are four to six feet tall, although special-order trees are larger. They are harvested as part of the regular process of thinning out the forests.

“We do our best not only to plant trees for future need [but also to make sure they are] the right size,” he added.

Foresting the land

Founded in 1901, the Jewish National Fund is a non-governmental organization that has been working to forest the land here for one hundred years - starting more than 40 years before the State of Israel was established.

“The land of Israel was in a fairly degraded state through a history of overgrazing and over-cutting,” Ginsberg said.

During World War I, the Ottoman Turkish rulers of the land cut down many trees to use to build the Hajaz railway, which stretched from Egypt through the Holy Land and Lebanon into Turkey, he added.

Since its founding, the JNF has planted 220 million trees nationwide — some 300,000-320,000 acres of planted forest, Ginsberg said — and “all planted by hand.”

The JNF plants a “very large variety” of trees, including pine, cypress, cedars and eucalyptus, as well as native trees such as oak, pistachio, red bud, carob, bay laurel, olive, almond, pomegranate and something known as Christ thorn, called as such because it is believed that it was used to plait the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head, said Ginsberg.

==============================

For conservatives, ‘Merry Christmas’ becomes a cause Christian groups press businesses (WorldNetDaily, 041215)

RALEIGH, N.C. — Emboldened by their Election Day successes, some Christian conservatives around the country are trying to put more Christ into Christmas this season.

In Terrebonne Parish, La., an organization is petitioning to add “Merry Christmas” to the red-lighted “Seasons Greetings” sign on the main government building, and is selling yard signs that read, “We believe in God. Merry Christmas.” In Raleigh, N.C., a church recently paid $7,600 for a full-page newspaper ad urging Christians to spend money only with merchants who include the greeting “Merry Christmas” in ads and displays.

“There is a revival taking place in our nation that is causing Christian and right-minded people to say, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve gone too far,’ “ says the Rev. Patrick Wooden Sr., pastor of the Raleigh church. “We’re not going to allow the country to continue this downward spiral to the left.”

In California, a group called the Committee to Save Merry Christmas is boycotting Macy’s and its corporate parent, Federated Department Stores, accusing them of replacing “Merry Christmas” signs with ones wishing shoppers “Seasons Greetings” or “Happy Holidays.” The organization cites “the recent presidential election showing political correctness is offending millions of Americans.”

Federated, for its part, says that is has no ban on such greetings, that its store divisions can advertise as they see fit, and that store clerks are free to wish any customer “Merry Christmas.” Macy’s says its ads commonly use the phrase.

The push from the religious right troubles Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “This mixing of secular and religious symbols ought to be seen as a bad thing, not a good thing, for Christian believers,” he says. “Unfortunately, some of the Christian pressure groups seem to have it backwards.” He adds: “I think it’s fair to say it’s a mistaken notion that they have a mandate to put more nativity scenes up because George Bush was elected.”

The battle over the manger on the city hall lawn is nothing new. People expect the annual tussle over the separation of church and state.

But the “keep the Christ in Christmas” contingent is particularly agitated this year over what its members see as a troubling trend on Main Street: Target stores banning Salvation Army bell ringers; UPS drivers complaining to a free-speech group that they have been told not to wish people a “Merry Christmas” (an accusation UPS denies as “silly on its face and just not true”); and major corporations barring religious music from cubicles and renaming the office Christmas bash the “end of the year” party.

“I think it is part of a growing movement of people with more traditional values, which make up the majority of people in this country, saying enough is enough,” says Greg Scott, a spokesman for the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund. “96% of us here in America celebrate Christmas.”

Amid stories of schools banning the singing of carols on buses, Scott’s group has distributed to more than 5,000 schools a seven-point legal primer citing 40 years of case law that says it is OK to mention Christmas in public places. And the group has about 800 lawyers waiting in the wings in case that notion needs to be reinforced.

To that same end, the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute, which says it received the UPS driver complaints, has reissued its “12 Rules of Christmas” guide to celebrating the birth of Jesus.

“I think the businesses and the schools have just gone too far; this is the final straw,” says institute president John W. Whitehead. “It’s supposed to be a time of, what, peace and freedom, and fun. And they’ve kind of made it into a secular . . . kind of gray day.”

Conservative radio and TV talk show hosts have chortled over some recent incidents. In Kansas, The Wichita Eagle ran a correction for a notice that mistakenly referred to the Community Tree at the Winterfest celebration as a “Christmas Tree.” And the mayor of Somerville apologized after a news release mistakenly referred to the Dec. 21 City Holiday Party as a “Christmas Party.”

==============================

French Religious Symbols Ban Cuts Two Ways (WorldNetDaily, 041213)

PARIS (AP) - They arrived as they do every December: gaily wrapped gifts destined for children at a kindergarten in rural northern France.

But this year, teachers unwrapped a few, took a look and sent all 1,300 packages back to City Hall. The presents were innocent, but strictly speaking, illegal: seasonal chocolates shaped like Christian crosses and St. Nicholas.

As Christmas approaches, France is awakening to the realization that a new law banning conspicuous religious symbols at schools - a measure used mainly to keep Muslim girls from wearing traditional Islamic head scarves to class - can cut both ways.

“It’s an unhealthy political affair. Absolutely regrettable,” said Andre Delattre, mayor of the northern town of Coudekerque-Branche, which has shipped the traditional chocolates to local schools for 11 years.

“What’s the point? It’s the children who are being penalized for this difference of opinion,” he said. “They’ve been deprived of a festive moment.”

The law, which took effect in September, bans overt symbols such as Islamic head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses at public schools.

More than a dozen teenage Muslim girls have been expelled from high schools for refusing to remove their scarves, along with three Sikh boys kicked out of a Paris-area school for wearing turbans.

But last week’s dispute over the chocolates was the first time the law - France’s response to what many perceive as a rise in Muslim fundamentalism - has been used to challenge Christian imagery.

A spokeswoman for the Education Ministry said Monday she was not aware of any other incidents involving Christian symbols in violation of the ban.

To be sure, even at Christmas time, few public school classrooms are decorated with crosses or other religious imagery in France, a traditionally Roman Catholic yet proudly secular country.

“In 1968, the slogan was, ‘It’s forbidden to forbid.’ In 2004, it’s, ‘Forbidding is a must,”‘ Bruno Frappat, editor of the Catholic daily La Croix, wrote in a weekend commentary. “And one of the phobias most in vogue is Catho-phobia.”

The situation in France differs sharply from that in neighboring Italy, where a 1924 law says schools must display the crucifix.

Pope John Paul II clearly had the French restrictions in mind when he waded into the fray in October to exhort Christians to more boldly display signs of their faith. The practice neither infringes on separation of church and state nor breeds intolerance, he said.

As officials police schools to keep overt religious symbols from undermining the nation’s cherished secularism, political leaders are locked in a fierce debate over whether to modify the 1905 law that enshrined the separation of church and state in France.

Nicolas Sarkozy, a former finance minister who heads President Jacques Chirac’s conservative Union for a Popular Movement party and is considering a run for the presidency in 2007, is leading a drive to amend the law and allow state subsidies for religious groups.

Sarkozy wants to give France’s 5 million Muslims, who form Western Europe’s largest Islamic community, the means to build mosques. He believes that bringing Islam out into the open would help Muslims integrate into French society and discourage extremism from flourishing among believers now meeting underground.

But Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin contend there’s no compelling reason to tamper with a law that has served as a cornerstone of modern French secularism for a century.

France is still coming to grips with its growing Muslim population. A wariness of Islam persists, reflected in a survey published Sunday by the newspaper Le Figaro that found two in three French oppose mostly Muslim Turkey’s quest to join the European Union.

Delattre, the Socialist mayor whose $5,300 gift of sweets was spurned, is annoyed that the ban on religious symbols at schoolhouses could intrude on a long-standing Christmas tradition.

“We ended up having to replace the chocolate figurines with regular chocolate bars,” he said. “Why? St. Nicholas is always portrayed with his cross.”

==============================

Fla. County Reverses Christmas Tree Ban (Foxnews, 041217)

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. — Get out the tinsel and lights, Christmas trees are returning to Pasco County buildings.

Pasco officials revoked a ban on Christmas trees in county buildings Friday, two days after ordering the trees to come down because they were considered religious symbols, said Dan Johnson, assistant county administrator for Public Services.

In a revised decision, the county attorney said that a Christmas tree is a purely secular symbol, along with Santa Claus and candy canes.

“Whether through misunderstanding or miscommunication, the actions and statements of this office ... have been taken to the extreme,” wrote Kristi Wooden, an assistant county attorney.

Wooden also said a menorah could be displayed with a Christmas tree if a sign was added to the display reading: “Salute to Liberty. During this holiday season, the (government entity) salutes liberty. Let these festive lights remind us that we are the keepers of the flame of liberty and our legacy of freedom.”

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice, said the sign wasn’t necessary, but “nobody’s going to complain about a sign about freedom and liberty.”

The center, a law firm founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, had asked the county to reverse the ban.

“It was a complete overreaction by the county, almost to the point of absurd,” Sekulow said.

Pasco County, with nearly 400,000 residents, is a fast-growing area that has a mix of rural and urban areas and whose population has grown due to the urban sprawl that has crawled north from Tampa.

Previously, the county allowed the display of Christmas trees but not religious symbols, Johnson said.

When a man wanted to display a menorah at a county building, the county attorney investigated and decided that menorahs couldn’t be displayed, but neither could Christmas trees, because both were religious symbols. Under the short-lived ban, Christmas trees could remain in various county government offices deemed “semiprivate” areas, such as personal offices.

“For 15 years, we didn’t have an issue, we didn’t have a problem,” Johnson said. “Hopefully we can all just return to normal.”

==============================

Judge OKs Christian Candy Canes in Texas (Foxnews, 041217)

PLANO, Texas — Last year, school officials told 9-year-old Jonathan Morgan he couldn’t give classmates Christian-themed candy canes at his elementary school´s “winter break” party.

On Thursday, a federal judge told him he can.

U.S. District Judge Paul Brown in Sherman ordered the 52,000-student Plano school district to let students distribute “religious viewpoint gifts” at school parties scheduled for Friday.

“It’s a huge win for students in Plano schools and it´s a big bolster for Jonathan,” said Doug Morgan, Jonathan´s father. “He really feels affirmed that exercising his right of religious expression in public is appropriate.”

Brown’s four-page order came a day after the Morgans and three other families filed a federal lawsuit accusing the district north of Dallas of banning Christmas and religious expression from their children´s classrooms.

The judge said his initial review of the lawsuit and testimony at a hearing Thursday convinced him the plaintiffs would suffer “irreparable” damage and “immediate” injury if he did not act. He cited “a substantial likelihood that Plaintiffs will prevail on the merits.”

Richard Abernathy, the school district’s attorney, said he respected the judge’s order. But Abernathy said the order was unnecessary because the district recently decided to allow the distribution of all materials — religious or otherwise — at Friday’s parties. That decision was shared with campus administrators Dec. 1, he said.

Asked if the policy was communicated to parents, Abernathy replied, “If it was, it wasn’t done very well.”

The lawsuit charges that the district has engaged in “unconstitutional and illegal actions,” from prohibiting candy canes and pencils with religious messages to banning red and green napkins at holiday parties.

Citing “the policy on distribution of school materials and non-school materials,” a letter sent to parents at Jonathan´s school on Dec. 6 urged parents to limit party supplies to “approved items,” including white plates and white napkins. Abernathy said the letter was written by a parent, not a school official. He speculated that white items were suggested to represent the color of snow.

According to the 161-page petition, “continual efforts to ban Christmas” from Plano schools prompted the lawsuit.

Hiram Sasser, director of litigation with Liberty Legal Institute, which represents the plaintiffs, said Thursday´s order was needed because the district´s written policy precludes dissemination of religious materials in the classroom.

“With the weird flip-flopping, parents just don´t know what students can and can’t do and it needed to be clear,” Sasser said, calling the verbal policy change “just a sham.”

Doug Morgan said his family joined the lawsuit because Thomas Elementary School refused to let his son pass out “goody bags” last year with pens shaped like candy canes and an accompanying story titled “The Legend of the Candy Cane.”

The legend suggests that the candy cane was invented by a man who wanted to pay tribute to Jesus Christ. The candy maker chose hard candy “because Christ is the Rock of Ages” and shaped it like a “J” for Jesus, according to the story.

In a letter to parents posted Thursday on the Plano schools Web site, Deputy Superintendent Danny Modisette wrote that the district “fosters acceptance of all cultures and welcomes the celebration of our diversity during the Winter Break parties.”

“The winter parties that many campuses celebrate during the final days of the first semester have been declared non-instructional time during the event, which allows students and parents to exchange holiday greetings and items with others,” Modisette wrote.

Earlier Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department said it is investigating the allegations and asked the plaintiffs’ attorneys to provide copies of all pleadings, affidavits, exhibits and other correspondence involved in the lawsuit.

In a letter to Liberty Legal Institute, Justice Department official Jeremiah Glassman said the preliminary inquiry concerns the district´s “alleged refusal to permit students to distribute religious messages during parties and on school property.”

“We stress that the Department has not made any determination about the merits of the allegations but is simply conducting a preliminary inquiry into the matter,” Glassman wrote.

Abernathy said he had received a letter from the Justice Department about the inquiry but could not comment because he had not had time to review it.

Sasser said the inquiry pleased him: “It is great to have a Justice Department that cares about religious freedom.”

==============================

Judge rules against school district (WorldNetDaily, 041216)

Says students, parents can exchange religious cards, wear red and green

A federal district court judge today granted a temporary restraining order to students and parents suing their Texas school district, thus allowing them to exchange religious cards and bring red and green party supplies to a school “Winter Break” party scheduled for tomorrow.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the Plano Independent School District was sued yesterday with lawyers for the plaintiffs claiming the district’s policies and practices – which include a ban on candy cane distribution when a religious card is attached, a ban on parents giving religious-oriented items to one another on school property, a ban on criticizing school board members or administrators on campus, and the barring of any colors but white at a school “Winter Break” party – are unconstitutional.

The timing of the suit was meant as an attempt to secure the restraining order so participants could enjoy tomorrow’s party without worrying about the district enforcing its policies. The action today was granted by Judge Paul Brown of the U.S. District Court in Sherman, Texas.

“These policies are a blatant violation of religious freedom and free speech. These are school officials who have lost all common sense,” Kelly Shackelford, Liberty Legal Institute’s chief counsel, told WND yesterday. Attorneys from Liberty Legal Institute and Alliance Defense Fund are representing the Plano families.

Richard Abernathy, the attorney representing the district, denies school officials were planning to enforce their policies at the Winter Break party.

“The Plano ISD made the decision that the holiday parties held on Friday, Dec. 17, were being held during non-instructional time,” Abernathy said in a statement. “As a result, the district decided that students and parents could hand out any materials, written or otherwise, that they desired as long as the distribution did not cause a material and substantial disruption to the school environment.”

Shackelford says regardless of how Abernathy might spin it, the district policy has not changed and does not differentiate between “non-instructional” and “instructional” time.

Said Shackelford: “Their statement is an admission that they’re in trouble now, so they’re trying to change things on the fly.”

The attorney pointed out the district could have notified all the parents via an e-mail list if it were changing a policy, “but they haven’t changed anything.”

==============================

Some suggestions for the Harvard faculty (townhall.com, 050301)

Star Parker

Lawrence Summers, I feel your pain.

The sad truth about a society that becomes increasingly politicized by the day is that the principal victim is integrity. Thoughtfulness and honesty count for less and less and appearances count for more and more.

Summers, president of Harvard, speaking informally at an economics conference dealing with diversity, suggested that one possible reason for fewer women on science and engineering faculties may be less inherent ability in women to perform at the highest levels of these fields.

Is this possible? Yes. Can you say this at a university? Apparently not. Summers’ remarks provoked a furor from many members of the Harvard faculty and now, of course, Harvard has a new task force to recommend procedures for hiring more women.

If truth, rather than politics, is what interests the Harvard faculty, this is what I suggest be done. Convene an inquiry into the proposition that women may not be as genetically disposed to math and science as men. If the result of this inquiry is a conclusion that this might be a possible _ not is the case, but might be possible, which is what Summers suggested _ then the faculty that attacked him is fired. If the inquiry shows that this is not a possibility, then Summers gets fired.

My guess is that Summers would submit to this exercise, but the dissenting faculty members would not. They would not because they know they would lose, and careful courageous inquiry is not what interests them. Their concern is that they maintain political power to advance their preconceived notions about how the world should be.

The first reactions at Harvard were to attack Summers, force an apology and demand politically motivated action. Why wasn’t the first reaction to rigorously examine his hypothesis? Isn’t this a university? Isn’t the point of a university the pursuit of knowledge?

I feel Summers’ pain because, as a black conservative, I deal with this sort of thing all the time.

Today my organization sent out a press release saying that reforming Social Security with personal retirement accounts is good for blacks. I received a one-sentence e-mail from the editor of a black newspaper calling me an Uncle Tom.

Clearly facts and analysis are of no interest to this man. He had no questions for me about why I have drawn the conclusions I have. It was just simply clear to him that if I hold this particular view, I must be a turncoat to my race.

This is the case in general in black politics. It is generally assumed that a black Republican is making it because he or she has sold out to the establishment. Doesn’t anyone wonder why the NAACP does not have events celebrating the first black woman secretary of state? Why does an organization whose mission is to advance the lot of blacks not celebrate Clarence Thomas, our black Supreme Court justice?

The issue, of course, is politics and not substance. The goal is not a thoughtful and just world, but a world that reflects preconceived notions of those who want to exercise power.

Suppose Summers said he simply had no idea why there are fewer women on science faculties. Or suppose he suggested it is impossible to understand. These responses too would have been unacceptable. The only acceptable response could have been what those protesting wanted to hear. Discrimination.

The women’s movement began with complaints about women being stereotyped and being treated like objects.

But quotas amount to treating people like objects. As do generalizations that correlate earnings to gender. However, dehumanization that produces politically acceptable results is fine to those who like the results it produces.

I discuss in my book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation” the meaninglessness of the term “minority.” What is it? It obviously has nothing to do with numbers. There are certainly ethnic groups that are fewer in numbers than blacks or Hispanics that are not considered minorities.

Black history is unique. There is no other group whose ancestors were dragged here in chains and enslaved. What is it that we have in common with other groups who are labeled “minority”?

“Minority,” of course, cannot be defined because it is a label that is purely political and used exclusively for politically motivated purposes. These purposes, through all sorts of attempts at special treatment, wind up producing the same dehumanization that we supposedly want to combat.

This former welfare mother has news that may disappoint many on the faculty at Harvard. There are no ultimate political solutions to making this a better or more just world.

I would suggest to them to consider “thou shalt not covet” as a productive alternative to head counting. And I would suggest that the use of universities in the honest pursuit of knowledge rather than politics will produce a far better world.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education and author of the newly released book ‘Uncle Sam’s Plantation.’

==============================

Rodney Dangerfield at Harvard (townhall.com, 050301)

Suzanne Fields

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, aspires to be the Rodney Dangerfield of academe: He don’t get no respect.

The least remarked upon issue in the Harvard fiasco is the indignity to which the faculty has subjected their president and, not least, his compliant groveling to keep his job by offering one abject apology after another. This pettiness writ large is familiar to anyone who has worked in academe.

Larry Summers arrived at Harvard with impeccable credentials, together with the asset of having worked in the real world as secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. This is no doubt the source of much of the resentment. Most Harvard professors are little fish in a little pond, where ego enhancements are limited to the adulation and sycophancy of manipulative teenagers. In 2001, the year before Larry Summers arrived on campus, grade inflation was rampant and 91% of the students graduated with honors.

Unless they break through the brass ceiling of academia by writing best-selling books, like Harold Bloom or Alan Dershowitz, or go to Washington to make policy like Henry Kissinger, college professors can only aspire to limited public recognition. They may occasionally get to testify before a congressional subcommittee, or offer learned commentary on the Lehrer Report, but mostly they must be content to publish badly written essays in obscure journals that nobody reads.

Many suffer postmodern media envy. One of the nastiest letters I ever received after I became a newspaper columnist was from a professor at a prestigious university who had obtained her Ph.D. in literature along with me; she wrote to tell me how awful I looked and sounded on television. How dare I leave the grove of academe? Unlike most professors at Oxford and Cambridge, our professors are rarely secure in their own skin and are unable to enjoy robust argument and debate for the sheer joy of contending for their ideas.

Political correctness, of course, is a corollary of the “gotcha!” mentality. Harvard may no longer be the “Kremlin on the Charles” (if it ever was) that Richard Nixon called it, and Larry Summers is no political conservative, but he offended sensibilities on the Charles when he praised ROTC and suggested that it was time to lift the Harvard ban imposed during the Vietnam war. He challenged professors who demanded that Harvard divest itself of investments in companies that do business in Israel: “The suggestion that (Israel’s) defense against terrorist attacks is inherently immoral seems to me to be an unsupportable one.”

But nothing quite galvanizes the advocates of political correctness more than discussion of the differences, obvious to everybody but a college professor, between men and women. Feminist studies emerged from the research of anthropologist Margaret Mead, who postulated that nearly all differences between the sexes were due to nurture not nature, culture not biology. Many of Mead’s conclusions became suspect when it was discovered that certain interview subjects she studied had lied to her, but suspect research continues as feminist theology.

Larry Summers brought on adult female tantrums when he remarked that his twin daughters had turned their toy trucks into a “daddy truck,” carrying a “baby truck.” Even a cursory reading of the transcript shows that he was trying to lighten up a densely provocative discussion of observable differences between the sexes. But it was the wrong audience.

Any group of mothers listening to the telling of this anecdote would nod their heads with knowing amusement, but humor is not, alas, a feminist virtue. Women who were there complain that he suggested more men than women are found at the highest levels of science and mathematics disciplines and this might be caused by sexual differences. He was neither dogmatic nor adamant, and he noted that the data available is “something people can argue about.”

In a full grovel, he later wrote to the faculty that “though my . . . remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that ‘I may be all wrong,’ I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields.” That’s right. He might have left it to the professors who teach “Gender and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism,” analyzing the way gender ideologies structure U.S. intervention and expansion in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Iraq.

Three women students at Harvard wrote a defense of their president in the Harvard Crimson, posted on a Web site supporting the president, www.studentsforlarry.org: “Like many, we do not always agree with our president, but we respect and applaud him for his tenacity, zeal, and willingness to stand up for the academy and freedom of thought at his own expense.”

I’d like to think many others in the academy agree, but I wouldn’t bet the college tuition on it.

==============================

B.C. not P.C. for students (WorldNetDaily, 050303)

Educators’ move to change ‘Before Christ’ to ‘Before Common Era’ sparking outrage

In what’s perceived as a case of political correctness trumping history and everyday usage, students in Australia are now seeing the calendar term B.C. – which stands for “Before Christ” – being replaced with BCE, meaning “Before Common Era.”

“This is political correctness gone mad,” Shadow Education Minister Jillian Skinner told the Sydney Daily Telegraph. “You ask the average mum and dad out there how they refer to time and calendars, they will use Before Christ [B.C.].”

The change by the Department of Education was first noticed during this week’s English Language and Literacy Assessment test, as 157,000 students in New South Wales were presented with the new term.

A history portion of the test described an ancient flooding problem this way:

“A government surveyor stood beside the Nile River looking worried. Beside him stood his assistants, carrying his equipment. The year was 590 BCE.”

A footnote was included to explain to students that BCE means “Before Common Era” (also known as B.C.).

“This is a case of history being rewritten and abandonment of the use of a calendar which has been around for centuries on the basis that the term might offend someone,” Skinner told the paper.

She says she’s spoken to parents and other educators who are extremely angry over the move.

The headline in the Telegraph declares: “‘Mad’ bureaucrats censor Jesus Christ.”

“They probably replaced an imagined potential controversy – the use of the term B.C. – with a real one,” Steven O’Doherty of Christian Schools Australia told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “The fact that they’ve taken it away has now generated the very controversy they may have been hoping to avoid.”

While B.C. is used in normal language as a historical and scientific chronology guide, BCE is often footnoted in international academic, scientific and museum contexts.

New South Wales Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt admits her department changed B.C. to BCE, but says it was done without her consent.

“The point I’ve made to the department is that both terms are in usage,” Tebbutt told ABC. “I’m completely comfortable with that. But if a text actually has B.C. in it, then we should be leaving it as B.C. We shouldn’t be changing it to BCE.”

The case is reminiscent of a December 2002 controversy in North America.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the Canadian museum displaying an ancient box purported to be the ossuary of Jesus’ brother James was no longer using the Christian designations of B.C. and A.D. to mark the calendar, opting instead for more “modern and palatable” terms.

Royal Ontario Museum abandoned Christian dating system for James ossuary

After a long internal debate, the Royal Ontario Museum decided to change “anno Domini” – Latin for “in the year of our Lord” – to C.E., referring to the “Common Era.” It also shelved B.C. in favor of BCE.

“A lot of people accept the reality of Jesus as a historical figure but don’t accept him as Christ, and to use the words ‘before Christ’ is really quite ethnocentric of European Christians,” Dan Rahimi, the museum’s director of collections management told Canada’s National Post. “And to use ‘the year of our Lord’ is also quite insensitive to huge populations in Toronto who have other lords.”

==============================

The end of self-reliance? (townhall.com, 050422)

George Will

WASHINGTON — It hurt her feelings, says Jane Fonda, sharing her feelings, that one of her husbands liked them to have sexual threesomes. “It reinforced my feeling I wasn’t good enough.”

In the Scottsdale, Ariz., Unified School District office, the receptionist used to be called a receptionist. Now she is “director of first impressions.” The happy director says, “Everyone wants to be important.” Scottsdale school bus drivers now are “transporters of learners.” A school official says such terminological readjustment is “a positive affirmation.” Which beats a negative affirmation.

Manufacturers of pens and markers report a surge in teachers’ demands for purple ink pens. When marked in red, corrections of students’ tests seem so awfully judgmental. At a Connecticut school, parents consider red markings “stressful.” A Pittsburgh principal favors more “pleasant-feeling tones.” An Alaska teacher says substituting purple for red is compassionate pedagogy, a shift from “Here’s what you need to improve on” to “Here’s what you have done right.”

Fonda’s confession, Scottsdale’s tweaking of terminology and the recoil from red markings are manifestations of today’s therapeutic culture. The nature and menace of “therapism” is the subject of a new book, “One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance” by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

From childhood on, Americans are told by “experts” — therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, traumatologists — that it is healthy for them continuously to take their emotional temperature, inventory their feelings and vent them. Never mind research indicating that reticence and suppression of feelings can be healthy.

Because children are considered terribly vulnerable and fragile, playground games like dodgeball are being replaced by anxiety-reducing and self-esteem-enhancing games of tag where nobody is ever “out.” But abundant research indicates no connection between high self-esteem and high achievement or virtue. Is not unearned self-esteem a more pressing problem?

Sensitivity screeners remove from texts and tests distressing references to things like rats, snakes, typhoons, blizzards and ... birthday parties (which might distress children who do not have them). The sensitivity police favor teaching what Sommers and Satel call “no-fault history.” Hence California’s Department of Education stipulating that when “ethnic or cultural groups are portrayed, portrayals must not depict differences in customs or lifestyles as undesirable” — slavery? segregation? anti-Semitism? cannibalism? — “and must not reflect adversely on such differences.”

Experts warn about what children are allowed to juggle: Tennis balls cause frustration, whereas “scarves are soft, nonthreatening, and float down slowly.” In 2001 the Girl Scouts, illustrating what Sommers and Satel say is the assumption that children are “combustible bundles of frayed nerves,” introduced, for girls 8 to 11, a “Stress Less Badge” adorned with an embroidered hammock. It can be earned by practicing “focused breathing,” keeping a “feelings diary,” burning scented candles and exchanging foot massages.

Vast numbers of credentialed — that is not a synonym for “competent” — members of the “caring professions” have a professional stake in the myth that most people are too fragile to cope with life’s vicissitudes and traumas without professional help. Consider what Sommers and Satel call “the commodification of grief” by the “grief industry” — professional grief “counselors” with “degrieving” techniques. Such “grief gurus” are “ventilationists”: they assume that everyone should grieve the same way — by venting feelings sometimes elicited by persons who have paid $1,795 for a five-day course in grief counseling.

The “caregiving” professions, which postulate the minimal competence of most people to cope with life unassisted, are, of course, liberal and politics can color their diagnoses. Remember the theory that because Vietnam was supposedly an unjust war, it would produce an epidemic of “post-traumatic stress disorders.” So a study released in 1990 claimed that half of Vietnam veterans suffered from some PTSD — even though only 15% of Vietnam veterans had served in combat units. To ventilationists — after a flood damaged books at the Boston Public library, counselors arrived to help librarians cope with their grief — a failure to manifest grief is construed as alarming evidence of grief repressed, and perhaps a precursor of “delayed onset” PTSD.

Predictably, 9/11 became another excuse for regarding healthy human reactions as pathological. Did terrorist attacks make you angry and nervous? Must be PTSD. And 9/11 gave rise to “diagnostic mission creep” as the idea of a “trauma” was expanded to include watching a disaster on television. Sommers and Satel’s book is a summons to the sensible worry that national enfeeblement must result when therapism replaces the virtues on which the republic was founded — stoicism, self-reliance and courage.

==============================

A delicate whitewash (townhall.com, 050502)

Diana West

It’s amazing what’s possible if you close your eyes. An American TV news organization, such as ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN or MSNBC, can close its eyes and accept videotape procured by Al-Jazeera in concert with terrorists who kill and maim American soldiers. A Hollywood director, such as Sydney Pollack, can close his eyes and pretend that terrorism is a plot device and the United Nations is an honest broker. Leaps of morality and boundaries of logic may be hurdled simply by turning a blind eye to facts.

To what end? Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Dorrance C. Smith connects the bloody dots between terrorists who assist Al-Jazeera in obtaining film footage that appears on the evening news in America. Among other pointed questions, he asks, “Do the U.S. networks know the terms of the relationship that Al-Jazeera has with the terrorists? Do they want to know?”

To date, the answer is a morally reprehensible no. But see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys aren’t the best role models for journalists. Then again, maybe this very numbness to facts is in fact a culture-wide phenomenon that our news media merely reflect.

Take Sydney Pollack’s new movie on international terrorism, “The Interpreter.” Stepping back from even the outermost brink of reality, it switches the source of terrorism from a fictional Middle Eastern country to a fictional African country.

“We didn’t want to encumber the film in politics in any way,” Kevin Misher, the movie’s producer, told The Wall Street Journal. Politics? How about encumbering the film with a little history, or maybe a few current events?

But fantasyland is where Hollywood lives these days. The world burns and Steven Spielberg remakes that sci-fi chestnut “The War of the Worlds.” The producers of last summer’s “The Manchurian Candidate” drop an Osama bin Laden-like character for being too “Tom Clancy.” Meanwhile, Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” was also too “Tom Clancy,” so the 2002 movie adaptation replaced the Islamic terror cell of the 1991 book with some generic old Nazis.

Then there’s “The Great New Wonderful,” the first movie set in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. But, as newyorkmetro.com reports, “The completed script never mentions Bush, terrorists, Michael Moore, Fox News or even Sept. 11.” Don’t look for Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama bin Laden or the fall of the Taliban, either. Why not? As director Danny Leiner put it, “I just wasn’t interested in anything didactic.” Didactic? What is “didactic” about our cataclysmic national experience? A potentially significant industry revels in its own irrelevance.

Of course, it gets worse. The New York Daily News reports that actress Maggie Gyllenhaal credits “Wonderful” with dealing “with 9/11 in such a subtle, open way that I think it allows it to be more complicated than just, ‘Oh, look at these poor New Yorkers and how hard it was for them.’” She continues: “I think America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way and so I think the delicacy ... allows that to sort of creep in.” Creep is right. Good thing “delicacy” is never, ever “didactic” or “encumbered by politics.”

Then there’s “24.” This is the Fox television series semi-notorious for having performed public penance — in the form of a PSA featuring star and co-producer Keifer Sutherland — because it dared to depict minimally identifiable Muslim characters carrying out terrorist activities against American civilians. Early on, the show even featured an exchange of “Allahu Akbar” between two terrorists — mumbled, yes, but a first — just as though the First Amendment applied to TV writers setting a story in the era of Islamic terrorism.

But following a no doubt friendly visit from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), lo and behold, the Fox show found what you might call “delicacy.” Suddenly, the program’s circumspectly Islamic gang included a full complement of white ex-military men, all with the inexplicable urge to shoot down Air Force One. In a recent episode, Marwan, the Muslim terror kingpin the show was originally “encumbered” with, videotaped a statement explaining why he was shooting a nuclear warhead at an American city. He did so standing before a flag covered in Arabic writing — daring for these politically correct times — but without once mentioning Allah, infidels, Islam or paradise. In other words, after all these years of Koranic communiques from assorted Islamic terror networks, Marwan’s big moment fell p.c.-flat. This doesn’t mean, though, that “24” isn’t the topically bravest show around.

Still, what were the producers afraid of? When networks, movies and television deny the facts of jihad terror, they whitewash killers. Why?

==============================

Dangerous times (townhall.com, 050714)

Emmett Tyrrell

LONDON — Well, in less than a week, it appears the British authorities got them! But what are they? The BBC last week edited out the word “terrorist” in its coverage of July 7th’s subway and bus bombings in favor of the word “bombers.” The BBC believed that the word would be less offensive to certain aggrieved British groups. Yes, terrorists have feelings, too. Now that the men who committed these grisly crimes appear to be Islamicists with terrorist sympathies and suicidal intent, can we call them terrorists? Can we call them Muslim terrorists? Can we call them Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists?

London was stalwart and inspiring last week. In the aftermath of the, dare I say, terrorist attacks, the Londoners went about their business, vowing to apprehend the criminals and otherwise carrying on just as they had during the war whose victory they celebrated on the weekend — German sensibilities be damned. But the longer I am in London, the more I discover that there are unsettling undercurrents within the government and among elites. One is the application of politically correct rules to coverage of the news. Another is to outlaw free speech as it relates to the treatment of Islamofascism and the bloody consequences of Islamofascism.

One of the first concerns of some after the bombing was a concern about “backlash.” Frankly, I did not know at first what the term was supposed to refer to. Was it referring to overreaction in terms of government action, say, London’s exerting some sort of pressure against foreign countries that harbor terrorists? Was it referring to increased police action against the citizenry? No, it was referring to hooligans attacking Muslims, which had not happened yet and so far has not, save for a few broken windows at a mosque. That sort of thing is deplorable, but why was violence against Muslims among the first concerns of British elites? The answer is that local Muslims have orchestrated this concern.

They have been very effective. As Mark Steyn pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, “In most circumstances it would be regarded as appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual ‘hate crime’ [last week’s bombings] by scaremongering about a non-existent one.” Yet apparently, this has been going on for some time, and now Prime Minister Tony Blair is hustling through Parliament a so-called Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. If passed, it would send a person to jail for seven years if he is accused and convicted of authoring words found offensive by aggrieved religious and racial groups, for instance, I suppose, aggrieved terrorists. Opponents argue that it would protect Satanists and other unusual believers.

How would it affect another journalist writing recently in a British paper, Charles Moore, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph and London’s Spectator? Recently, he quoted a Saudi imam welcomed to Britain by Mohammed Abdul Bari of the East London Mosque. The reverend imam, a couple of years back in Mecca, described Jews as “scum of the earth,” “rats of the world,” “monkeys and pigs who should be annihilated.” When the imam is criticized by the likes of Moore, Abdul Bari furiously defends him. Moore went on to quote the local Muslim Weekly’s Sheikh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi’s writing that parliamentary democracy in Britain must be replaced by “a new civilization based on the worship of Allah,” and his description of the leader of the Tory Party as “an illegal Jewish immigrant from Romania.” He also referred to the “near-demented Judaic banking elite.”

In his trenchant article noting that Islam has yet to come up with a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Moore criticized another visitor to London welcomed by London’s left-wing mayor, Ken Livingstone. The visitor, a world-renowned spiritual leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, supports suicide bombing in Israel, whipping homosexuals, and killing Americans in Iraq, civilians and soldiers alike. Research such as this could land Moore in a British calaboose if the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is passed.

In the West, certain groups have a knack for capturing the moral high ground and ending debate. When the feminists did this and the gay rights groups accomplished this, mischief ensued but nothing more damaging. If Islam’s apologists for terror accomplish this feat, the world is in for more than mischief. London will be in for more carnage and America, too.

==============================

Mascot mayhem (townhall.com, 050826)

Mary Katharine Ham

I grew up in a liberal, college town. The town was so liberal that it created mini-activists who went around inventing things to be offended by. One of those junior grievance-mongers chose the bulldog mascot as the object of his offense. The bulldog was a white cartoon canine with a red, spiked collar. His fierce, growling grin adorned the gym’s rafters, the football field, and the marquee out front.

Can’t find anything to be offended by? Don’t worry, there are lefties all over who can help you. In this case, it was a creative ninth-grader. At the tender age of 14, he had perfected the art of fabricated outrage (maybe one of his parents taught the course at the University of North Carolina). He decided that the bulldog was offensive because his depiction was too aggressive. His spiked collar and bared teeth had violent connotations. This young man convinced the school administration it should file the cartoon’s fearsome fangs and take the spikes off his collar. Back in high school, we were thankful this young man didn’t play any sports. We were sure his athletic career would have ended inside a locker.

Turns out, he was just warming up for a gig at the nation’s top sports association—the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which is becoming the authority on manufactured outrage. On August 5, the NCAA announced that it would ban all schools with “hostile or abusive” Native American logos, mascots, and nicknames from hosting NCAA championship competition.

It may affect as many as 19 NCAA institutions whose recent self-studies on the Native American mascot issue did not satisfy concerns that some people could consider the use of the mascot or imagery hostile or abusive.

Apparently “some people” means the NCAA itself. Or, maybe “some people” refers to a handful of self-appointed Native American activists and a whole lot of guilty, white liberals.

It doesn’t refer to the 81% of Native Americans who believe colleges and high schools should keep their Native American nicknames, according to a survey commissioned by Sports Illustrated. “Some people” doesn’t include the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which approved the clothing and makeup for Florida State’s mascot, the legendary Chief Osceola.

“Some people” doesn’t include the respected Native American artist who drew the logo for the University of North Dakota’s Fighting Sioux, nor does it probably include the hundreds of Native American students who have graduated from UND’s “Indians Into Medicine” and “Indians Into Aviation” programs.

Chief Maynard Kahgegab of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe is not one of “some people.” In 2002, he signed a proclamation supporting Central Michigan University’s use of the Chippewa nickname.

Florida State and North Dakota have appealed the NCAA’s decision, and Florida State has already been exempted. Central Michigan is following suit, and the Fighting Illini are weighing their options. NCAA Vice President Bernard Franklin had this to say in the wake of Florida State’s successful appeal:

“The decision of a namesake sovereign tribe regarding how its name and image can be used must be respected, even if others may not agree.”

You think? If the NCAA is so worried about fostering sensitivity and avoiding hostility and abuse, here are a couple things for the association to think about.

Perhaps assuming that all Native Americans are offended as one despite their varied heritages and histories is more bigoted than than the Utes’ use of a feather in their logo.

Perhaps stepping in to act as protectors for sovereign nations of people who are capable of making their own agreements with local schools is more of a throwback than a Native American artist’s painting of a Fighting Sioux adorning the gym wall at UND.

Perhaps making this decision without any knowledge of how individual tribes feel about their depictions is more ignorant than cheering the Fighting Illini.

Perhaps subjecting the agreements of sovereign nations to review by a mere athletic association is more abusive than a Choctaws t-shirt.

Maybe shielding white liberals from their guilt is less important when it means depriving regular Americans of a weekly dose of Native American heritage and history in the form of Chief Osceola, the Unconquered galloping the sidelines at ‘Noles games.

And, maybe bestowing a Native American name upon a sports team that Americans of all ethnicities spend untold amounts of energy, money and emotion cheering isn’t always hostile and divisive.

If you are an alumnus of one of the 19 schools affected by the NCAA’s broad ruling, I encourage you to ask their respective presidents to appeal the decision. The mascot issue is a gray one that should be left to individual tribes and schools to hash out. The NCAA should learn to listen more closely to its members—of all ethnicities—than to a bunch of liberal activists who likely cut their own teeth on such good deeds as filing down the fangs of cartoon dog mascots.

The NCAA has shown itself to be more condescending, dismissive, and prejudiced when it comes to Native Americans than the folks who have spent years loving teams with Native American mascots. If there are problems, tribes and schools should work them out—not an athletic association that seems intent on playing a “Great Father” role that is more offensive than any mascot it’s trying to ban.

Listed below are the 19 schools whose mascots would be affected by the NCAA’s regulation, which goes into effect in February:

The 19 schools are (with nicknames) Alcorn State University (Braves); Arkansas State University (Indians); Bradley University (Braves); Central Michigan University (Chippewas); Carthage College (Redmen); Catawba College (Indians); Chowan College (Braves); Florida State University (Seminoles); the University of Illinois, Champaign (Illini); Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Indians); the University of Louisiana at Monroe (Indians); McMurry University (Indians); Midwestern State University (Indians); Mississippi College (Choctaws); Newberry College (Indians); the University of North Dakota (Fighting Sioux); Southeastern Oklahoma State University (Savages); and the University of Utah (Utes). The College of William and Mary (Tribe) has been given an extension to complete its self-study on the mascot issue.

==============================

Silent Night, Secular Night: Is Christmas verboten? (National Review Online, 051028)

Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

“Christmas is under attack in such a sustained and strategized manner that there is, no doubt, a war on Christmas.” So writes Fox News Channel host John Gibson in his new book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Blue state or red state, putting up a Christmas tree and not having to call it a “friendship tree” or a “giving tree” can often be quite the battle. Gibson relays some of the stories in The War on Christmas.

Gibson recently sang his carols to National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Will you say “Merry Christmas” on air this year? Is that something that distinguishes Fox News from other media?

John Gibson: Fox News Channel put a “Merry Christmas” greeting on the air last year, as well as a “Happy Channukah” (though at this precise moment I’m not certain what spelling was used). I expect to see both again. As for me, I also say both depending on who it is I’m greeting, and yes, I do say the wrong thing sometimes. It happens. I trust that people understand no insult is meant if it happens to be the wrong greeting.

Lopez: You take on Aaron Brown in your introduction. Is this all a competitive anti-CNN thing?

Gibson: I wouldn’t say I “take on Aaron Brown”. I just pointed out what he said, and why he was wrong diminishing the importance of Christmas to a great number of Americans. As for the general anti-CNN thing, that’s just the nature of competition. I want to beat them everyday, and I usually do. It’s not that anybody’s counting, or paying excessively close attention, but I have beaten my CNN opponent for 44 straight months.

Lopez: Isn’t it a little much to be talking about “War on Christmas?” If Islamist terrorists were targeting Christmas celebrations, okay. But Festivus doesn’t seem to rise to the level of war, does it? Do you hurt your argument by over hyping the problem?

Gibson: Do I hurt my argument by over hype in my choice of title, “The War on Christmas”? No. I think there is a general war on Christians underway in our country. You hear it in political discussions all the time when a Democrat or a liberal will decry the power of those “right wing evangelical Christians,” and you hear it in the arguments about Intelligent Design, abortion, prayer in school, the Ten Commandments on courthouse walls, and frankly, a bunch of other ordinary discussions.

So in The War on Christmas I expose how that casual, accepted anti-Christian bias shows up once a year around Christmas when people in positions of petty power, such as school administrators, or municipal-hall managers, will suddenly pop up saying things like “We can’t have that Christmas tree in here because it’s too Christian.” I had a long discussion with a city human-resources manager who said precisely that. What I find shocking is that people like that man do not hear the sound of their voices. Substitute any other religion for the word “Christian” and these very people would be up in arms with the cry of prejudice and bias, but if the bias is directed at Christians, it is perfectly acceptable.

Also, if you look at the newspapers over the last five years you find these stories popping up every Christmas season, with almost exactly the same arguments made, and almost exactly the same result each time: disaster.

I do believe the atmosphere is improving in some places, because people have recognized the downside of institutionalized hostility to religion in general and Christianity in particular. Tolerance is the tradition in this country, and tolerance should be extended to Christians during their important holiday period.

Lopez: Not to belabor, but: Isn’t some of the “Happy Holidays” stuff out there understandable, polite, appropriate? When you’re on air, you’ve got Christians, yes, but Jews and Muslims and others are also tuning in. Should they have to be hearing about a Christian holiday—in their faces as if there were something wrong with them for not celebrating it? Or are you all for dumbing down Christmas to make it a secular holiday everyone can celebrate?

Gibson: …Yes, if you are greeting someone you know to be a Jewish person you might want to give the appropriate greeting. But I’ve also had Jewish people say to me that they don’t feel insulted when a Christian says “Merry Christmas” and even though there is no logic to wishing a non-Christian “Merry Christmas” if taken literally, I think most people get it, and understand no harm is meant and it is a greeting of simple well wishing.

This issue of non Christians being confronted with Christianity wherever they go at Christmas time seems to me to be best answered by “Well... DUH!” It’s a Christian holiday and it’s a big one. 84% of the country self identifies as Christian. 96% of the country observes or celebrates Christmas in some form, if only slightly, so what would one expect? I think Christmas does require the forbearance of non-Christians, but I don’t think it should be a big issue. Once again, the American tradition is tolerance, and I see no reason why tolerance should not be extended to the majority religion and its secularized symbols.

As for the issue of dumbing-down Christmas, I’m probably the wrong guy to ask. People active in church, or actual clergy will say “yes,” and will insist that a Christmas tree is not a religious symbol of Christianity the same way that a crèche is. And consequently, they continue to insist that the proper public display of a Christian religious symbol is the crèche. I would say they are right, and I urge them to continue to make that argument.

Lopez: Are you pro prayers in school?

Gibson: I am pro prayer in school if the urge to do some comes from the person praying, and not an official or functionary of the school or local government. I understand that here in New York vacant classrooms are made available for Muslim students to pray when their own religious conscience requires, and the same right should be extended to Christian or Jewish students, or students of any other religion. We all know when religion impinges on the life of people other than the faithful, and I see no reason students may not exercise their constitutional right to pray.

Now, more to the point: Should football coaches be allowed to lead a prayer? I don’t see why not. Should there be prayers over the public-address system at schools? I wouldn’t think it’s the best idea, but I also don’t see why not. It depends on the community and the people involved. If the question is, should non-believers be subjected to the prayers of believers, I say “come on... what’s so damn hard about sitting quietly for a minute with your mouth shut?”

Lopez: Your subtitle blames liberals for this Christmas “war,” but is it really the Left’s fault? Is there something fundamentally liberal about not wanting “Christmas?” They’ve never invited me over, but I assume the Kennedys celebrate Christmas and all.

Gibson: I have gotten a lot of quibbling about my use of the word “liberal” in the subtitle. First, it certainly is not the conservatives doing these things. Second, if there is a distinction somebody wants to make between liberal and far-Left, I’d have to say “Ok....fine.” I think it’s clear it is liberals who are the purveyors of an anti-Christmas, anti-Christian bias. Not all liberals. Certainly not southern liberal churchgoing people, because I point out in my book that it is the First Amendment Center, founded by a well-known liberal newspaperman, which has come running to help out school districts that have gotten in a big Christmas catastrophe by banning or suppressing Christmas symbols, but I don’t think there’s any question that “liberal” is an apt description of the lawyers and others who take action to remove Christmas from schools or city halls or law schools.

I am acquainted with at least one of the famous Kennedys you refer to, and yes, I understand they celebrate Christmas with vigor, and they would not be the liberals I refer to.

Lopez: How much is the ACLU to blame for this war on Christmas nonsense?

Gibson: First of all, there are many ACLUs. One in every state, at the very least, and a national organization. So an ACLU lawyer in one place might do something markedly different than an ACLU lawyer in another place. For instance, in Massachusetts the local chapter of the ACLU sided with the Bush Justice Department in a suit over a student’s right to give a gift that contains a religious message to another student. Both the ACLU in Massachusetts and the Bush Justice Department prevailed in their argument that the gift was constitutionally protected free speech on the part of the student. ACLU lawyers have taken the other side of the same issue elsewhere in the country.

Having said that, generally there is an ACLU component to a Christmas controversy. There is either an outright suit brought by an ACLU lawyer on behalf of a complainant, or the threat of such a suit in the background of nearly all the stories I cover in my book, and generally I think you will find the ACLU weighing in on the “December Dilemma” every year.

Lopez: Why do you care about Mustang, Oklahoma?

Gibson: Mustang, Oklahoma, seemed to me to be the last place in the world where you’d find a school administrator banning anything having to do with Christmas. But it happened, and it was a disaster for school administrator, Karl Springer. Voters turned down a school-bond issue in an election that followed Springer’s decision to cancel a religious scene from the school Christmas pageant. He was under fire and really had no safe harbor, until he heard about a (liberal) group which works with people like him to establish a religion policy for schools that everybody in the community can agree with and live by. It was an interesting story even beyond the obvious headline that this kind of story isn’t expected in a red state place like Mustang, Oklahoma.

Lopez: The courts aren’t totally warm to Christmas. Which leads one to consider the dangers of judicial activism. Do you have a dog in the Harriet Miers fight?

Gibson: I don’t have a dog in the Harriet Miers fight. I’ve been amused at the state of apoplexy among some of my conservative friends, and the brand-name conservative pundits who I always enjoy hearing. I don’t think an entirely unqualified person should be nominated to the highest Court in the land, but I’m not sure she’s entirely unqualified. I’ll wait to see what she sounds like in her hearings. But it is obvious her nomination is in trouble, and I think her conservative opponents may actually have succeeded in giving Bush second thoughts.

Lopez: Your last book was on Anti-Americanism. Is there any kind of tie-in with the “War on Christmas”?

Gibson: The only tie-in I can see is that the anti-American crowd in Europe is always making a lot of noise about the religiosity of America. That bunch is extremely intolerant of Christian religionists, and tends to always make a false and vicious association between American Christians and Muslim terrorists. But other than that, I wouldn’t think there are a lot of similarities. In Hating America: The New World Sport the idea was to look over newspapers and other publications for what the world was saying about us. In The War On Christmas the idea was to talk to the people involved in some emblematic anti-Christmas incidents in this country, to interview them in depth about what went into these various (bad) decisions, and what happened after. So the books are different in many ways.

Lopez: Why are you making me think about Christmas already? I have a few weeks yet until I even have to fight for the best Turkey Day Butterball in the supermarket.

Gibson: I am making you think about Christmas already because the book business moves at the speed of freight companies, the people actually shipping books. So it’s slow, and if it doesn’t start now, it’s already too late.

Lopez: Aren’t you a pure, politically virginal, totally objective journalist, Mr. Gibson? How can you possibly take sides on an issue as you have in this book (as well as your previous one)?

Gibson: I’m pretty much not a virginal anything. No, I deliver the news, I interview people, and I have an opinion when I reveal to the audience. I have been doing opinion in a piece called My Word for five years or so. I enjoy it. Nobody’s fired me yet.

Lopez: What’s your goal in getting this book in people’s hands?

Gibson: I want people to understand that the idea that religious tolerance is good includes the idea that it’s also good to be tolerant of the largest religious group in this country. I don’t think Christmas, nor Christians, should be suppressed. I think people should recognize that Christians are called to spread the word, and their efforts in that area should be afforded the same tolerance we afford other religionists.

Lopez: As an early Christmas gift: Tell me something about Roger Ailes I don’t know and will get a kick out of knowing.

Gibson: Roger Ailes is best boss I’ve ever had in television, and that includes a bunch of people. He is clearly the smartest person in the media today. He is also the most loyal and (here’s the shocker!) caring boss I’ve ever had. When I say “caring” I mean about many people who work at Fox, not just me. People who are in hospitals hear from Roger, people who are struggling hear from Roger, and people who need to speak to Roger will find that he usually makes time so they can see him. I think anybody working for Roger is very lucky. I know I am.

==============================

Call It What It Is (Foxnews, 051028)

By John Gibson

My favorite topic these days: The annual war on Christmas.

As you may have heard, I wrote a book about it called “The War on Christmas” and in it I go over a case in Covington, Georgia, when the school board wanted to make a change on the school calendar. They wanted to change the name of the Christmas break from winter break back to Christmas break.

The ACLU came to the school board and said, “If you do that, we’ll sue. It’s an unconstitutional violation of church and state.”

What’s the violation in calling the Christmas vacation what it is?

“Well,” said the ACLU lawyer “calling the break ‘Christmas’ would coerce children into becoming Christians.”

Coerce? The word Christmas on the calendar would coerce little munchkins into church?

That was the ACLU position. And separation of church and state required banning the word Christmas.

That’s what happened because the school board was advised it would lose the fight.

Absurd. But it’s happening again, even as we speak.

In the Northwest, I have learned there are ACLU lawyers combing over the Web sites of school districts looking for school administrators who insist on calling Christmas break “Christmas break.”

The lawyers are ready to go stamp this out.

They will undoubtedly assert that calling the Christmas vacation what it is — Christmas — will coerce children into Christianity.

Here’s a news flash for the school boards of the Northwest who may already have gotten an ACLU letter: There is nothing illegal about calling Christmas vacation “Christmas vacation.”

The Supreme Court has never declared it unconstitutional. And I am willing to bet that if an ACLU lawyer ever came to the Supreme Court arguing that the word Christmas somehow coerces kids into becoming Christians, the sound we would all hear would be side-splitting laughter from the normally solemn justices of the Supreme Court.

That one doesn’t even meet the laugh test.

==============================

Trumping Moses and Matthew (townhall.com, 051107)

by Suzanne Fields

What do the Bible and the “The Vagina Monologues” have in common? Not much. But surely we can all agree that both are covered by the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

Well, that’s not so at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. At UWEC you can live in a dorm and watch a performance of “The Vagina Monologues,” but you can’t join a Bible studies group. Any resident assistant, or RA, as the live-in student counselors are called, can put on a performance of the play, and one has, but leading a Bible studies class in his or her own room and on his or her own time, is forbidden. Many students want such a class, but they’re out of luck.

The director of university housing says the ban is necessary to enable the RAs to “share” the perspectives of the students, to make RAs “approachable.” Vagina perspective trumps the perspectives of Moses and Matthew in behalf of “approachability.” That certainly sounds postmodern enough.

Where have we found such empty-headed university administrators? This destructive silliness goes to the root of politically correct attitudes: Feminist ideology, good; the Bible, bad. Dismissing the begats so easily begets intolerance and ignorance. Reaching for moral equivalence, the housing director reassures critics that the Koran and the Torah are banned, too. The university is now considering an extension of the bans to forbid political and ideological discussions.

Such flouting of the traditions of free speech — and good sense — is typical of the disease of political correctness that in various forms infects many campuses, denying students a fundamental understanding of the meaning of free speech. “The First Amendment doesn’t end with Bible study or with ‘The Vagina Monologues’ — it guarantees a student’s right to perform both,” says David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a six-year-old watchdog organization and clearinghouse for the bad news of campus offenses against free speech.

This latest offense follows another objection at UWEC where the student senate barred funding to any campus organization that promotes a “particular ideological, religious, or partisan viewpoint.” That covers just about anything a curious student could talk to anyone about. Not so long ago — within the memory of Americans still alive — universities set rules to inhibit sensual temptation, to protect young people at an age when they were particularly vulnerable to sexual promiscuity. Now sexual promiscuity is barely an elective, and Big Brother and Sister Nanny shield everyone from the temptation of intellectual debate of secular and religious philosophies. By banning free speech, the universities impose indoctrination in lieu of learning. The Founding Fathers are spinning, but they’re only dead white men, after all.

FIRE’s website (thefire.org) includes maps with ratings of colleges that routinely punish students and faculty for saying things that hurt feelings and threaten “self-esteem.” Although some college administrators retreat in the face of challenges of these speech codes, a casual survey turns up a catalog of taboos of language and dumb jokes.

Bowdoin College, for example, bans jokes and stories “experienced by others as harassing.” Brown University prohibits “verbal behavior” that produces “feelings of impotence, anger, or disenfranchisement,” whether “intentional or unintentional.” Colby College outlaws speech that causes “a vague sense of danger” or a loss of “self-esteem.” The University of Connecticut prohibits “inappropriately directed laughter.” Only dangerous subversives dare watch “Comedy Central” at UConn. Syracuse University nixes “offensive remarks . . . sexually suggestive staring . . . [and] sexual, sexist, or heterosexist remarks or jokes.” No daydreaming of trysts at Syracuse.

West Virginia University tells freshmen to use language that is not “gender specific.” So “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” are out; “lover” or “partner” is in. Maybe they’ll stage a production of “Romeo and Juliet” in drag. The University of North Dakota defines harassment as anything that intentionally produces “psychological discomfort, embarrassment, or ridicule.” If a “person” comes out of the ladies room trailing toilet paper from the bottom of her foot, a la Gilda Radner in a memorable “Saturday Night Live” skit, make sure you don’t tell her about it.

These speech codes would be laughable if they weren’t so serious. But there’s a larger lesson here. “If students on our nation’s campuses learn that jokes, remarks and visual displays that ‘offend’ someone may rightly be banned, they will not find it odd or dangerous when the government itself seeks to censor and to demand moral conformity in the expression of its citizens,” warns FIRE. “A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it has lost.” We need those FIRE alarms.

==============================

Don’t ban Christmas, schools told (Victoria Herald Sun, Australia, 051121)

Victoria, Australia

EVERY Victorian school and kindergarten has been officially told: don’t ban Christmas celebrations.

Premier Steve Bracks yesterday gave his official encouragement for nativity scenes, carols and other Christian traditions.

Jingle Bells can ring in classrooms around the state again after several schools banned nativity scenes and carol singing last year for fear of offending non-Christian children.

Mr Bracks told the Herald Sun the Government would send a message to every primary and secondary school reminding them not to ban Christmas.

“All schools and kindergartens should be able to have nativity plays and Christian celebrations,” Mr Bracks said.

“Those who don’t wish to participate don’t have to, and those who wish to celebrate in their own way can do so.

“But even those from other faiths, of course, accept Christian celebrations and the Government is keen to ensure there are no bans on any of these sorts of activities.”

Mr Bracks said he wanted to encourage tolerance of all faiths.

His intervention comes after several schools last year refused to stage Christmas celebrations.

Some kindergartens and childcare centres also banned nativity scenes in favour of end-of-year parties with no mention of Christmas.

Mr Bracks said census figures showed Victoria was essentially a Christian society and Christmas traditions should be celebrated.

The latest census figures show Australia-wide there are about 10.9 million Christians, 357,000 Buddhists, 280,000 Muslims and 84,000 people of Jewish faith.

Mr Bracks said he would today ask Premier and Cabinet department secretary Terry Moran to write to the Education Department to pass on his message to Victorian schools.

Religious leaders yesterday welcomed the move.

Among them was the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne’s Vicar General, Monsignor Les Tomlinson, who said bans on nativity scenes and Christian themes were political correctness gone crazy.

In a world living with the constant threat of terrorism, Monsignor Tomlinson said tolerance and respect were needed more than ever.

“The Christian message is so important. The message of compassion for the suffering of others, of tolerance, of respect, of pursuing peace through justice — they only enhance human society,” he said. Rabbinical Council of Victoria Rabbi Meir Shlomo Kluwgant strongly supported the Premier’s move.

“I believe it is vital that we teach our children to respect each other’s right to have, practise, freely express and celebrate our own different religions and particularly when it comes to expression of religious beliefs and celebrations that promote goodwill amongst all people,” Rabbi Kluwgant said.

The Islamic Council of Victoria could not be contacted yesterday, but Muslim leaders have criticised the promotion of a secular Christmas instead of religious celebrations as political correctness gone mad.

While Mr Bracks wants to see more Christmas cheer in schools, many councils across the city are abandoning traditional yuletide celebrations.

Port Phillip Council is happy to play the role of Scrooge.

It will spend just $3000 for a cherry picker to decorate a tree with fairy lights outside St Kilda Town Hall.

Bayside City Council will dress up two pine trees at Dendy Park for its annual Carols in the Park.

But chief executive officer Catherine Dale said the council had not bought any Christmas decorations to display in its municipality.

Other councils are restricting decorations to shopping strips in an attempt to boost trading over the festive season.

But in Maribyrnong, the council has decided to display new star decorations in its shopping precincts at a cost of $60,000.

Chief executive officer Kerry Thompson said the star design was chosen because it was “simple, affordable and can be used in a number of design options and is recognised as a festive image”.

The spirit of Christmas is alive in regional centres with Bass Coast Shire Council backing celebrations in all main townships.

It will spend about $20,000 on banners and lights and will provide additional decorations to Cowes and Wonthaggi to provide “maximum impact and unify townships”.

In the historic towns of Stawell and St Arnaud, the Northern Grampians Shire Council will launch new, bright Christmas banners and decorations with a distinct Australian flair, designed by a local graphic artist.

==============================

Friend or Foe of Christmas? (Foxnews, 051121)

By John Gibson

On another front in the “War on Christmas,” Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Counsel, a 24,000-member evangelical group, has announced its own Merry Christmas say-it-loud-say-it-proud campaign. It’s called “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign” and promises to file suit against anyone who spreads what it sees as misinformation about how Christmas can be celebrated in schools and public spaces.

Falwell’s group says it has 750 lawyers ready to pounce on the first school administrator who tries to stop a teacher from leading kids in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

This is what is called “backlash.” It’s what I wrote about in “The War on Christmas,” in which I describe the efforts of secularists to suppress or shunt aside symbols of Christmas that most of us recognize as secular, but which are being declared religious so that they must then be banned.

This is how you get bans of Christmas trees and Santa and — in Plano, Texas — even the colors red and green.

None of that is required under the U.S. Constitution. So, in that sense, Falwell’s group is right and when they challenge these bans, they will win.

==============================

Falwell’s faithful put Hub on notice: Don’t diss Christmas (Boston Herald, 051123)

Jerry Falwell and an army of conservative lawyers drew a line in the snow yesterday, warning Boston and other cities: Don’t mess with Christmas.

And even before the first volley was fired, City Hall caved.

Just after a top lawyer for the conservative Liberty Counsel blasted the Hub’s annual “holiday tree” ceremony, a Menino administration official scrambled to do damage control.

“This is a Christmas tree,” Boston Parks Commissioner Toni Pollak insisted about the Nova Scotia spruce the city will light Dec. 1 on historic Boston Common. “It’s definitely a Christmas tree.”

However, the city’s official Web site refers to the event as “Boston’s Official Holiday Tree Lighting.”

“Calling a Christmas tree a holiday tree isn’t being inclusive. It’s disenfranchising people of faith. It’s like calling a menorah a candle stick,” said Mathew Staver, Liberty Counsel’s president and general counsel.

Falwell, the powerful Evangelical Christian pastor, has put the power of his 24,000-member congregation behind the “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,” an effort led by the conservative legal organization Liberty Counsel. The group promises to file suit against anyone who spreads what it sees as misinformation about how Christmas can be celebrated in schools and public spaces.

If Falwell is looking to do battle in liberal Massachusetts, he’ll have plenty of opportunities.

# In Westfield, a group of high school students was suspended for distributing candy canes with religious messages. A federal court ultimately found the suspensions unconstitutional.

# Last year, an ACLU lawsuit led to a creche being banished from an elementary school display in South Norwood.

# In Lexington, the Knights of Columbus filed a lawsuit challenging selectmen’s decision to bar them from erecting a creche on the town green, but a federal judge upheld the ban.

“Today, it seems like all religious symbols are being erased,” said Kathleen Hintlian, a Lexington mother of five who used to take her children to visit the creche each year. “I thought it represented hope and peace. And we need that especially in our world today.”

Falwell urged the 500,000 recipients of his weekly e-mail to “resist bullying tactics of the ACLU and others who intimidate school and government officials by spreading misinformation about Christmas.”

The ACLU of Massachusetts struck back, noting its support of two women who were fired from a Raynham racetrack several years ago because they refused to work on Christmas.

“We support both separation of church and state and religious freedom,” said Sarah Wunsch, staff attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts. “I think it’s wrong of Falwell – and against the spirit of the season – to cast this as us versus them.”

==============================

Family Group Calls for Boycott of Target Stores (Christian Post, 051123)

A family organization is calling for a boycott of Target stores this Thanksgiving weekend over the nationwide chain’s policies to keep away solicitors such as Salvation Army bell ringers and for preventing workers from using the phrase “Merry Christmas” in their stores and ads.

The America Family Association is telling shoppers about Target’s “faith-and-family unfriendly practices.” According to AFA chairman Don Wildmon, Target wants the profits from Christian families’ spending but not the holiday message or the spirit of their charities, reported Agape Press.

Last year, Target enforced its no-solicitation policy with the Salvation Army despite years of making an exception, saying that there were too many organizations asking for the same benefit. So instead of deciding which ones would be allowed to solicit, it decided to keep everyone away.

AFA’s campaign during one of the most intense shopping periods of the year also involves another group – Campaign for Children and Families, which is promoting the boycott and urging shoppers to not “forget to TELL Target why you aren’t shopping there.”

Last week, Target’s stock fell 7% following the company’s warning that an increase in sales at some stores would be down this year. In response to the announcement, the AFA wrote on its site that “Target is Getting the Message.”

Agape Press reports that over 340,000 people have signed an online petition that states that if the kettles continue to be banned and if “Merry Christmas” is no longer allowed in store advertising, the petition signers “will not be shopping at Target” during Thanksgiving weekend.

AFA stated that it would also be sending an edited version of the petition to various other stores who have also banned the “Christmas” phrase. The stores include: Costco, BJ’s, Sears/K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s.

Meanwhile, a new development in the Target-Salvation Army relationship this year was the recent joint decision to launch “The Target/Salvation Army Wish List,” which will raise funds for hurricane relief. [comments by Kwing Hung: a partial retreat?]

With the store solicitation ban still in place, Target approached the Salvation Army to work in a different way. Through “The Target/Salvation Army Wish List,” donations will be made by online shoppers at Target.com/salvationarmy starting Nov. 25.

Recognizing the Salvation Army’s work, a Target spokeswoman said the chain store would work to “make a real difference in the lives of families across the country this holiday season.”

==============================

Marlowe’s Koran-burning hero is censored to avoid Muslim anger (Times Online, 051124)

IT WAS the surprise hit of the autumn season, selling out for its entire run and inspiring rave reviews. But now the producers of Tamburlaine the Great have come under fire for censoring Christopher Marlowe’s 1580s masterpiece to avoid upsetting Muslims.

Audiences at the Barbican in London did not see the Koran being burnt, as Marlowe intended, because David Farr, who directed and adapted the classic play, feared that it would inflame passions in the light of the London bombings.

Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, said that if they had not altered the original it “would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions”.

The burning of the Koran was “smoothed over”, he said, so that it became just the destruction of “a load of books” relating to any culture or religion. That made it more powerful, they claimed.

Members of the audience also reported that key references to Muhammad had been dropped, particularly in the passage where Tamburlaine says that he is “not worthy to be worshipped”. In the original Marlowe writes that Muhammad “remains in hell”.

The censorship aroused condemnation yesterday from senior figures in the theatre and scholars, as well as religious leaders. Terry Hands, who directed Tamburlaine for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992, said: “I don’t believe you should interfere with any classic for reasons of religious or political correctness.”

Charles Nicholl, the author of The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, said it was wrong to tamper with Marlowe because he asked “uncomfortable and confrontational questions — particularly aimed at those that held dogmatic, religious views”. He added: “Why should Islam be protected from the questioning gaze of Marlowe? Marlowe stands for provocative questions. This is a bit of an insult to him.”

Marlowe rivalled Shakespeare as the most powerful dramatist of the Elizabethan period. He died aged 29 in a brawl over a tavern bill. Tamburlaine the Great was written not later than 1587. It tells the story of a shepherd-robber who defeats the king of Persia, the emperor of Turkey and, seeing himself as the “scourge of God”, burns the Koran.

Mr Farr reworked the text after the July 7 attacks. The production closed last week. Mr Farr said in a statement: “The choices I made in the adaptation were personal about the focus I wanted to put on the main character and had nothing to do with modern politics.”

But Mr Reade said that Mr Farr felt that burning the Koran “would have been unnecessarily inflammatory”. The play needed to be seen in a 21stcentury context, he believed.He said: “Marlowe was not challenging Muslims, he was attacking theism, saying, ‘I’m God, there isn’t a God’. If he had been in a Christian country, a Judaic country or a Hindu country, it would be their gods he’d be attacking.” He said more people would be insulted by broadening the attack.

Inayat Bunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, disagreed, saying: “In the context of a fictional play, I don’t think it will have offended many people.”

Park Honan, Emeritus Professor at the School of English, University of Leeds, and author of Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy, said: “It is wrong to tamper with the play, wrong to shorten it and wrong to leave out the burning of the Koran because that is involved with the exposition of Tamburlaine’s character. He’s a false prophet. This is meant to horrify the audience.”

THE DEVIL CAN CITE SCRIPTURE FOR HIS PURPOSE

Behzti

Sikh protesters claimed that the play at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in December mocked their religion because it depicted sexual abuse and murder in a temple. The author, Gurpreet Bhatti, said that she had been threatened and police advised her to keep a low profile. After a weekend of demonstrations, the play was cancelled

Jerry Springer the Opera

It had a successful run in the West End but came under fire from Christian groups and mediawatch-UK when it was bought by the BBC and shown on BBC2 in January. They claimed that it contained 8,000 expletives and had mocking religious undertones. Estelle Morris, then the Arts Minister, ended up defending it in the House of Commons

Messiah

Steven Berkoff inspired widespread critical debate with his interpretations of Jesus’s life at the Theatre Royal in 2001. Berkoff, who wrote and directed the show based on his own reactions to the Gospels, depicted Jesus as a foul-mouthed social reformer rather than the traditional representation of him as a preacher

The Merchant of Venice

The latest adaptation a year ago, starring Al Pacino, re-opened the debate on whether Shakepeare’s Shylock was a deliberately racist caricature. Many claim that he reflects the anti-Semitism of the Bard’s age, an essential element of the plot. But producers still come under pressure to tone down the more disparaging traits

THE OFFENDING LINES

Tamburlaine: Now, Casane, where’s the Turkish Alcoran, And all the heaps of superstitious books Found in the temples of that Mahomet Whom I have thought a god? They shall be burnt . . .

. . . In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet.

My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell, Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends, And yet I live untouch’d by Mahomet.

There is a God, full of revenging wrath, From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks, Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.

So Casane; fling them in the fire.

(They burn the books.)

Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power, Come down thyself and work a miracle.

Thou art not worthy to be worshipped That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ Wherein the sum of thy religion rests . . .

. . . Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell; He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine.

Seek out another godhead to adore:

The God that sits in heaven, if any god, For he is God alone, and none but he.

Act V, scene i Tamburlaine the Great

==============================

Don’t stifle Christianity by political correctness, says Carey (Times Online, 051219)

THE public expression of the Christian faith and other religions is being undermined by political correctness, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, says.

“I think there is a view around that practising Christianity and all the symbols that go with it embarrasses people of other faiths and of course that’s nonsense,” he told GMTV’s Sunday Programme.

This month a Derby schoolgirl was sent home after she refused to remove her crucifix necklace. A crucifix was “an expression of our faith”, Lord Carey said, dismissing the claim that it was jewellery. “I’m glad that many people have risen up against that and said it’s nonsense,” he said.

“I think it may come from a certain nervousness — maybe it’s excited by the visibility of Muslims in our country, with some girls wearing burkhas.

“There’s certainly nothing wrong with wearing a cross or crucifix or having those symbols in our classrooms. It’s proper that you should have a discussion of that nature.”

He was worried that the school’s decision “may represent a worrying hostility towards Christianity and all religions by a minority of people in leadership today who want to privatise religion, push it to the boundaries, not allow a voice in the public arena, and go the way of France.

“I personally think that would be a retrograde step. That would not be the Britain I know.

“We can’t keep faith out of politics or out of public life. It’s part of our own identity.

“I don’t expect the Prime Minister to preach that he is moving into my kind of job, but he has got every right to say his Christian faith pervades and influences all that he does.”

Lord Carey, who retired as head of the Anglican Church in 2002, said that Christians should be more explicit about their faith and proud of the Cross.

“We must avoid the kind of political correctness that is creeping in and undermining the public expression of the Christian faith.”

The debate over the school’s barring of the crucifix could be “very good news for the Church” he said. “It may make us much more aware of the meaning of these symbols so that when we put these things on, we do it because it means something and it’s not simply a piece of jewellery.”

He added that MPs should do more to “recover our identity about being British today. I cannot understand how you can be British without having the core faith at the heart of it which is Christianity.

“To the legislators I say: ‘Let’s apply common sense principles to all our laws and legislation but let’s be aware of the rich vein of the Christian faith which runs through our history and laws, culture, literature and so on’. If you take the Christian faith out of British identity what have you got left? “That’s not to say you can’t be British and a Jew or British and a Muslim — of course I’m not saying that. But we are talking about a British identity. The majority of people in this land identify themselves by a common language, by common culture and by the implicitness of the Christian faith itself. It’s a very important part of our identity.”

==============================

NBC to mock the Crucifixion of Christ (American Family Association, 060202)

On the April 13 edition of NBC’s Will and Grace, Britney Spears will appear as a Christian conservative sidekick to Sean Hayes’ homosexual character, Jack, who hosts his own talk show.

Jack’s fictional network, Out TV, is bought by a Christian TV network, leading to Spears contributing a cooking segment called “Cruci-fixin’s.” To further denigrate Christianity, NBC chose to air it the night before Good Friday.

NBC does not treat Jews, Muslins or other religions with such disrespect. Yet the network demonstrates a deep of hostility toward followers of Christ.

==============================

Schools Juggle Holidays for Other Faiths (Christian Post, 060721)

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Christian — each faith has its holy days. Schools across the country are asking how to respect them all.

Consider the University at Albany, which canceled classes on major Muslim holidays. Faculty wanted the move out of concern for Muslim students after the Sept. 11 attacks. But then came the questions: What about Hindus? Buddhists?

President Kermit Hall last fall decided to return to the original calendar.

“Can you operate a university and give each religious group an accommodation? I think the answer is, ‘No,’” he said.

Make that “maybe.” School administrators across the country are rethinking their calendars as their student bodies become more diverse.

In May, Muslim parents asked New York City’s education department for days off on two major Muslim holidays, which some districts in Michigan and New Jersey already have granted. In January, a Long Island mosque petitioned New York Gov. George Pataki to consider the holidays when scheduling mandatory statewide testing. Last month, the state Legislature passed a bill that would take all religious holidays into account when scheduling the mandatory tests. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called it the first step toward recognizing Muslim holidays in public schools.

But also last month, despite a Muslim group’s lobbying at every board meeting, the Baltimore County district in Maryland approved a calendar with a day off for the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana, but none for Muslim holidays. The group had hoped the district’s growing diversity — 47.8% of students last year were minorities — would be persuasive.

“Either I go against my faith, or I miss my schoolwork and have imperfect attendance,” said 15-year-old Kanwal Rehman, who will enter 10th grade in Baltimore this fall. In January, her midterm exams fell during Eid al-Adha, one of the two most important holidays in Islam.

It can get complicated. When Muslims in the Tampa Bay region of Florida asked for a day off to celebrate the end of Ramadan, another local religious group perked up.

“There was discussion in the Hindu community if we should also push for a holiday,” said Nikhil Joshi, a board member of the national Hindu American Foundation.

The Hillsborough County school board responded by ending days off for all religious holidays. The move inspired more than 3,500 e-mails. Christian leaders pleaded for the Muslim holiday. Finally, the district restored this fall’s original calendar, with days off for Good Friday, Easter Monday and the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur.

The Muslim community was relieved it hadn’t hurt other faiths. The Hindu community decided not to ask for days off.

“You would hope in a country of religious freedom all would be recognized, but we know that’s not practical,” Joshi said.

School districts say they can’t take days off for purely religious reasons, but they can act if they think operations are affected by students or staff taking the day off.

That practice gives school holidays a certain regional flair. Some schools close for the beginning of hunting season. San Francisco schools have Cesar Chavez Day on March 30 to celebrate farmworkers, and Chicago schools have March 5 to honor Casimir Pulaski, a Polish count who helped the American side in the Revolutionary War.

Religion is more sensitive. Some districts mark “special observance days” when no test or exam can be scheduled. Other districts find inspiration in the business world — each student gets a number of “floating” days to celebrate his or her own holidays with an excused absence.

“‘Choose your own holiday’ has become more popular,” said Kathryn Lohre, assistant director of Harvard University’s Pluralism Project, which studies diversity in religion. “It takes pressure off the school boards.”

New Jersey’s board of education now lists 76 excused religious holidays, from Russian Orthodox to Sikh. New York City schools are even more flexible. Students with a letter from parents get an excused absence for a holiday in any religion.

Some have tried the traditional route of schoolwide holidays, and failed. In Ohio, the Sycamore Community School District once canceled classes on the Jewish High Holy Days after some parents asked why schools closed on Good Friday. Muslim and Hindu parents then asked why they didn’t get days off. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the district.

The case was settled in 2000, and the High Holy Days became school days again.

==============================

The Slippery Slope of Political Correctness (Foxnews, 061016)

You know what bugs me about this Wendy’s trans fat thing? Not that it’s not the physically correct thing to do. It is. But that it’s the politically correct thing to do. And it shouldn’t.

When we cave to those who tell us what we should eat, we’re swallowing a lot more than food.

We’re swallowing our pride, our individuality, our very freedom of choice.

We’re swallowing what made us Americans. Americans who know when they walk into a fast food restaurant they’re not there to score points with Jack La Lanne.

Americans who know that they can order a burger or a salad. Their choice. Their consequences. We became who we are not protecting us from ourselves, but being ourselves. Many of us are fat not because of Wendy’s, but because of us.

Now there are those who want to protect us... from us. They’re policing our food, policing what’s put in our food and policing whether we even get that food.

They say they are doing this for our own good. Be careful of such good intentions. Social states are built on what governments think is in our interests, if not in our stomachs.

All I’m saying is a government big enough to dictate what we eat, isn’t that far from dictating how we think.

We live in a world where restaurants would rather switch oils than fight lawsuits.

It should be enough to make us all lose our appetites. Because let me tell you something, we’re losing something even more: our country.

==============================

Michigan School Pulls ‘Huck Finn’ After Parental Complaint (Foxnews, 061102)

TAYLOR, Mich. — Mark Twain’s classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has been pulled from high school classes after a parent of a black student complained that a teacher had students read portions aloud.

There is only one black child in the English class where the book, which contains racial slurs, was read aloud and acted out, The Detroit News reported Thursday.

The book will remain on the shelves at Taylor School District’s high schools. The district’s curriculum committee will recommend to the school board whether the book should have a future in district classrooms.

“We want to be sensitive to how the children feel,” said Lynette Sutton, assistant superintendent for secondary instruction.

The 1880s novel about a white boy’s first-person account of his adventures along the Mississippi River with a runaway slave named Jim has long been controversial because of its use of racial slurs and its representations of blacks and women.

==============================

‘God’ References Removed from In-Flight Movie (Christian Post, 070125)

ATLANTA (AP) - So much for God and country, at least during some in-flight showings of the Oscar-nominated movie “The Queen.” That’s because all mentions of God are bleeped out of a version of the film given to some commercial airlines.

Even in these politically correct times, censoring references to God in the film wasn’t a statement of some kind. Rather, it was the mistake of an overzealous and inexperienced employee for a California company that edits movies selected for onboard entertainment.

The rookie censor was told to edit out all profanities _ including any blasphemy _ for the version of the movie distributed to Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, Air New Zealand, and other carriers.

So the new censor mistakenly bleeped out each time a character said “God,” instead of just when used as part of a profanity, said Jeff Klein, president of Jaguar Distribution, the company that distributed the movie to airlines this month.

“A reference to God is not taboo in any culture that I know of,” Klein said. “We excise foul language, excessive violence and nudity.”

In-flight viewers of the film at one point heard “(Bleep) bless you, ma’am,” as one character spoke to the queen. In all, the word “God” is bleeped seven times in the version.

Fortunately, at no time in the original film is the common phrase “God save the queen” spoken or else passengers from the United Kingdom might have been royally irritated to hear “bleep” invoked to save Her Majesty.

Klein discovered the mistake after a London-bound Air New Zealand passenger complained earlier this month and the airline apologized for showing “the incorrect version of the film.”

Airlines routinely work with studios to get film versions that have removed the kind of graphic scenes and strong profanities that would not be shown on network TV, Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton said. Officials with Delta and Air New Zealand say their airlines have been showing the edited version of ‘The Queen’ on many international flights.

Jaguar has been replacing all the cassettes it sent out _ in English and other languages _ to its airline clients with the original, unedited version of the movie.

“The Queen” depicts the reactions of British monarch Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair in the week following Princess Diana’s death in 1997. Much of the drama revolves around the opposed perspectives of the modernizing prime minister and the old-fashioned queen.

On Tuesday, the movie was nominated for the Academy Awards for best picture and best actress for Helen Mirren’s performance as the queen.

The editor responsible for the mistake is still working in the editing laboratory of the Studio City, Calif.-based company, Klein said.

A spokesman for Miramax, which produced the film, declined to comment on the editing.

==============================

Librarian sues ‘gay’ profs over ‘Marketing of Evil’: Christian accused of sexual harassment for recommending best-selling book (WorldNetDaily, 070308)

A university librarian accused of “sexual harassment” simply for recommending all incoming freshmen read the popular book “The Marketing of Evil” by David Kupelian – a case that made national headlines, having been called the year’s most “shameful” campus persecution case – has filed a defamation lawsuit against the accusing faculty members.

Scott Savage, a devout Quaker and head of Reference and Instructional Services at the Bromfield Library on Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus, had been condemned by a 21-0 faculty vote on March 13, 2006, to be formally investigated for “sexual harassment.” The reason? Several professors, two of them openly homosexual, had become extremely upset over Savage’s nomination for the freshman reading program of “The Marketing of Evil,” calling it “hate literature.” Subtitled “How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom,” chapter one of the book exposes the marketing strategies and tactics of the “gay rights” movement.

As WND reported previously, one of the homosexual professors, J.F. Buckley, in a March 9, 2006, e-mail, reacted this way to Savage’s recommendation of Kupelian’s book: “As a gay man I have long ago realized that the world is full of homophobic, hate-mongers who, of course, say that they are not. So I am not shocked, only deeply saddened – and THREATENED [sic] – that such mindless folks are on this great campus. ... You have made me fearful and uneasy being a gay man on this campus. I am, in fact, notifying the OSU-M campus, and Ohio State University in general, that I no longer feel safe doing my job. I am being harassed.”

The unprecedented attack on a librarian over a book recommendation attracted national media attention, as well as a threat of a legal counterattack by the Alliance Defense Fund. Finally, on April 18 of last year, OSU backed down and informed Savage the charges against him had been withdrawn.

Now, Savage is fighting back. On Tuesday, attorneys representing the librarian filed a defamation lawsuit in the Court of Common Pleas in Richland County, Ohio.

Named as defendants are OSU-Mansfield professors Norman W. Jones, James F. Buckley, Hannibal Hamlin and Gary Kennedy, as well as 10 additional “John Does” and “Jane Does” – which the lawsuit characterizes as “members of the OSU-Mansfield faculty members and/or other identified persons who conferred privately with Defendants Jones, Buckley, Hamlin and Kennedy and/or acted in concert with them to advance the goal of defaming and humiliating Mr. Savage at OSU-Mansfield and in the broader community.” The idea being that the identities of the additional defendants will become known through discovery once the case gets rolling.

According to the lawsuit:

4.1 In early February, 2006, Plaintiff Scott A. Savage agreed to serve on the First Year Reading Experience Committee (“Committee”), the purpose of which was to select books that OSU-Mansfield’s freshmen students would be required to read as part of their immersion into college life. At the Committee’s first meeting, several books were proposed that carried a leftist perspective on history, culture, or politics. The proposed books included works by Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Jimmy Carter. …

4.4 On March 8, 2006 … Mr. Savage suggested via e-mail to the Committee that perhaps the conventional wisdom of the university should be challenged and proposed four current conservative books: “The Marketing of Evil” by David Kupelian, “The Professors” by David Horowitz, “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” by Bat Ye’or, and “It Takes a Family” by Senator Rick Santorum. As required by Committee protocol, Mr. Savage included excerpts from Amazon.com’s descriptions of the books.

4.5 On March 9, 2006, Jones e-mailed the Committee taking issue with Mr. Savage’s recommendation of “The Marketing of Evil,” labeling it “anti-gay” and “homophobic tripe.” Mr. Savage e-mailed the Committee to offer other reviews of the book and to defend his academic freedom to suggest it to the Committee. Jones then took the further step of sending a private e-mail to Mr. Savage’s supervisor, Library Director Beth Burns, questioning the integrity of the library staff and implicitly attacking Mr. Savage’s professionalism. Jones also sent an e-mail to the campus Dean, threatening to look for other work and explicitly denigrating Mr. Savage’s professionalism in suggesting the book. Jones then sent another e-mail to the Committee attacking Mr. Savage’s academic opinions.

4.6 Hamlin responded with an e-mail to the Committee warning Mr. Savage that requiring students to read “The Marketing of Evil” would violate OSU-Mansfield discrimination policy. …

4.10 On March 12, 2006, Jones sent an e-mail to all faculty members attacking Mr. Savage’s professional competence, and accusing him of “harassment” and “creating a hostile work environment” for himself and Buckley. Jones also claimed that Mr. Savage had acted unprofessionally by disagreeing with Jones’ assessment of the book and had “impugn[ed] both [Jones’] credibility as well as that of the entire OSU-Mansfield faculty in determining the basic standards of scholarly integrity.”

4.11 At a March 13, 2006 faculty assembly, a public meeting, Defendant Hamlin accused Mr. Savage of defending “hate literature” and stated to the faculty assembly that the overriding issue raised by Mr. Savage’s conduct was that of “sexual harassment.” Jones agreed that “It is a sexual harassment issue.” Based upon the facts known to Hamlin and Jones at that time, their statements to the faculty assembly were false, slanderous per se, and made in reckless disregard of the truth.

4.12 In response to the slanderous advocacy of Jones and Hamlin, the faculty unanimously approved a motion to forward a sexual harassment allegation to a university investigator accusing Mr. Savage of sexual harassment.

Although the faculty later “rescinded its vote on the sexual harassment motion because of concerns and confusion over the faculty’s authority on the matter,” the complaint explains, Kennedy and Hamlin continued to press the issue, “falsely accusing Mr. Savage of discriminatory harassment, seeking other policies under which Mr. Savage’s constitutionally protected speech could be punished, and urging that a discrimination/harassment claim be filed against Savage.”

Indeed, Hamlin persuaded the faculty assembly to instruct Kennedy, Jones and Buckley to file individual formal complaints of discrimination/harassment against Savage. And on March 16, Kennedy filed a discrimination/harassment complaint on behalf of Buckley and Jones with OSU-Mansfield’s Human Resources Officer, who along with the university’s general counsel, classified it as a “sexual harassment” complaint.

One month later, the OSU-Mansfield Human Resources investigator informed Savage in writing that he was not guilty of discrimination/harassment and that the charges should never have been filed. The embattled librarian took a leave of absence from his employment at the university, “a decision caused by his extreme emotional distress that was the direct result of this controversy and the Defendants’ false accusations against him,” according to the lawsuit just filed.

“Particularly distressing to Mr. Savage,” says the complaint, “a man with sincerely held Christian beliefs regarding honesty, Christian charity, sexual purity and marital fidelity, is the knowledge that his name is linked on campus (and probably elsewhere) with allegations of sexual harassment, unethical behavior, and hatred of his fellow man. No amount of diligence and discovery by Mr. Savage, in the context of this litigation of otherwise, could ever determine the extent to which his name is now linked with those allegations in the minds of people, known and unknown to him, who do not know the other relevant details of this case.”

Savage is represented by Cincinnati attorney Thomas W. Condit and co-counsel Trip Bodley of Batsche & Batsche in Mason, Ohio.

“This is the most extreme case of political correctness I’ve ever heard of,” said Condit. “For the faculty to say it doesn’t want to suppress any viewpoint, and then to go after Scott in this way, it’s shocking, people have to be appalled at this.”

In addition, said Condit, “this has done real damage to Scott and his family. He feels his career is threatened by the publicity, with his name associated with sexual harassment. And he’s now in his second six-month, unpaid leave of absence, since he felt staying at the university had become untenable.” Savage is scheduled to return to OSU in June.

One particularly poignant aspect of the case stems from the fact that Savage is a Quaker, specifically a “Plain Christian” – having written two books on his faith: “A Plain Life” and “The Plain Reader.”

Part of the Quaker belief is pacifism. So how does Savage square his lawsuit with his Christian beliefs?

“I am nonresistant in the sense of not fighting back against a robber or murderer,” Savage explained. “We believe this is commanded for believers. But Friends (Quakers) also believe that government is established for our good. Persecution by these government-employed educators of those whose beliefs differ from campus orthodoxy is not good government.

“Simply because of their beliefs, the earliest Quakers were roughed up, their homes and goods destroyed, their due process rights trampled, all by people acting in the name of the government. Although they did not resist these evildoers, they were enjoined by the founder of the Quakers, George Fox, to ‘lay your sufferings on the judges, and the King.’

“These college professors have just as roughly damaged my life and career, having tried me – in absentia – and found me guilty of ‘sexual harassment,’ and then of ‘discrimination based on sexual orientation’ merely because I recommended ‘The Marketing of Evil.’

“I am laying my sufferings on the judges – the real ones, not the professors.”

WND also asked Savage how his treatment by the university faculty affected him, his career and his family.

“That’s a question no faculty member on my campus has ever asked!” he said. “We have eight children and I am the sole provider, so you can imagine our fear at the possibility of suddenly losing my income. My wife was three months pregnant, and she lost about ten pounds in the first few weeks of this, making me fear for the baby (who was born healthy in October).

“The worst part, though, was coming home and having to tell my wife that I was being accused of sexual harassment. We had to be careful to talk about it out of earshot of our (sexually pure and innocent) children. The very sort of thing we avoid as a plague was forced into our household by this awful, untrue charge.”

Savage also explained his legal battle in professional terms: “Librarians need to counter academic bullying and censorship – it is in our code of ethics, and I take that charge very seriously,” he said.

One irony of the story is that after being “banned” on the Ohio State University-Mansfield campus last year by “gay” professors and their faculty supporters, “The Marketing of Evil” soared up the best-seller lists, remaining No. 1 on Amazon’s “Current Events” list for a week. And OSU students reported that the book was sold out at all book stores in the area surrounding the university.

==============================

Credentials or Political Correctness? Naming a Surgeon General (Christian Post, 070731)

Mark Earley

If you were going to appoint a surgeon general to office, you’d want to make sure he had impeccable qualifications, perhaps something like a degree in medicine from Duke, a Ph.D. in anatomy and physiology, and a graduate degree in hospital administration. They’d need experience, something like serving as medical director for the Department of Veteran Affairs for 25 years, chancellor of the University of Kentucky Medical Center, and secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services for Kentucky.

Well, unfortunately these qualifications of Dr. James Holsinger, the President’s nominee for new surgeon general, aren’t impeccable enough. No, apparently, he needs an advanced degree in political correctness.

Dr. Holsinger, a Methodist layman, once sat on a judicial council for the United Methodist church. In accordance with the current Methodist discipline, he stood against a decision to allow a practicing lesbian as an associate pastor. But what really angers his opponents is a paper he wrote in 1991 for the Methodist Committee to Study Homosexuality. The paper was titled, “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality.” A recent editorial in the Washington Post eviscerated Dr. Holsinger for suggesting that homosexual conduct is unnatural and unhealthy.

Holsinger made the audacious claim that anatomically and physiologically, men and women are complementary. And, he dared to write, “when the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur.”

Scientific research backs his claim. The Centers for Disease Control revealed in a 2005 report that male homosexuals account for at least 71% of all adult and adolescent males living with the deadly HIV/AIDS. And despite the wave of condom-based “safe-sex” education, these numbers are up 11% from 2001.

And HIV/AIDS is not the only health risk that any good doctor would point out to someone considering the homosexual lifestyle. CDC statistics also show that homosexuals are, by far, most likely to contract nearly all forms of STDs.

Unfortunately, in the recent confirmation hearings, Dr. Holsinger distanced himself from his earlier stance. About the 1991 paper, he says, “The paper does not represent where I am today.” It’s an ambiguous statement and leaves us wondering whether the good doctor is shying away from the medical facts, maybe from an earlier tone or simply has been browbeaten mercilessly.

What it does show us is the unbelievable pressure that comes to bear on anyone who would dare to question the morality of homosexual conduct, or point out the health risks.

The Post concluded one of its editorials by writing, “Does Holsinger still believe that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy? If the answer is yes, he should not be confirmed.”

Well, there you have it. And you can expect to see that litmus test more and more. Christians in public life will be under enormous pressure to recant not only on what they believe, but also the cold, hard facts.

==============================

U.K. Christian Students, Faculty Forced to Don Muslim Garbs (Christian Post, 071102)

Students and teachers at a primary school in England were forced to dress up as Muslims to celebrate a belated Muslim festival although most were Christians.

All 257 students and 41 teachers at Rufford primary school in Lye, England, were ordered to wear traditional Muslim dress in an effort to promote multi-culturalism, reported the U.K.-based Daily Mail newspaper on Wednesday.

It is said that in the entire school only two staffs were Muslims – a part-time teacher and an assistant teacher.

“Staff have got to go along with it – or let’s face it, they would be branded racist,” reportedly said a relative of one of the staff, according to British tabloid The Sun.

“Who would put their job on the line?” the relative added. “They have been told they have to embrace the day to show their diversity. But they are not all happy.”

The Muslim dress up was in observance of Eid, the end of Ramadan. The school held a morning assembly to mark the event and an afternoon party only for women – in adherence with the Muslim tradition of wives not mixing with other men.

Father Jonathan Morris, an analyst for Fox News pointed out that the story will probably not receive much attention in the United States because of the “can-do-no-wrong” thinking linked to diversity, pluralism, and multi-culturalism among mainstream media. Instead, they would agree that promoting tolerance in any way is good.

“And I would agree,” said Morris in a Fox News column. “But I would add that there is nothing tolerant about imposing a minority group’s traditions and beliefs on the majority. There is nothing tolerant about glorifying all expressions of culture except one’s own.

“There is nothing tolerant about cowing Christians into acting like Muslims, intimidating Jews into acting like Christians, scaring Muslims into acting like Westerners, or even worse, suggesting that we should all be nothing,” said Morris.

“This, I would say, is a sign of a dictatorship of cultural relativism. Such absurdity has nothing to do with tolerance.”

The Roman Catholic priest warned that if the United States continues “to buy” the ideology of cultural relativism then “America as we know it will cease to exist.”

Morris advised the United States promote and celebrate its cultural and religious heritage, while also respecting minority “in as much as they promote the common good for society.”

==============================

Three Pigs story ruled ‘offensive to Muslims’ (Foxnews, 080124)

A children’s story based on the tale of the Three Little Pigs was rejected for an award after judges became concerned that it would offend Muslims, the Times of London reported.

The animated virtual book for primary school children, The Three Little Cowboy Builders, was also criticized for its potential to offend builders.

The row centered on the Bett awards, which were supported by Becta, the Government’s technology agency for schools. The judges’ remarks, reported on the education technology Web site Merlin John Online, included: “Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?

“The idea of taking a traditional tale and retelling a story is fine, but it should not alienate parts of the workforce. Judges would not recommend this product to the Muslim community in particular.”

Ann Curtis, whose company, Shoo Fly Publishing, produced the CD-Rom, said the criticisms were unjustified and could even “propagate a racist stance”. She said: “I felt disbelief, to be honest. As a small company, we have a strong ethical and moral grounding. We support the rights of all children in the world to have access to education.

“To be told that we cynically set out to alienate minority groups is a very narrow-minded view.” She said the group had had messages of support from the local community, including Muslims. The book had already won an award in a separate competition.

But the Bett award’s backers — Becta, the Besa trade association and Emap Education — said that the book was rejected for a range of reasons. In a joint statement, they said: “The reason The Three Little Cowboy Builders was not shortlisted was that it failed to reach the required standard across a number of criteria. The . . . issues highlighted were a small selection from a much broader range of comments.

“In particular, the product was not sufficiently convincing on curriculum and innovation grounds to be shortlisted.”

The statement said the competition aimed to “reward inclusive and accessible designs” and was judged by a panel of 70 people, including many teachers.

==============================

Christian warriors to eat ‘Muhammad’: Political TV hosts fed up with PC Islam will devour cookie with face of prophet (WorldNetDaily, 080124)

This cookie with a depiction of the Muslim prophet Muhammad will be eaten on ‘Flamethrower,’ a new political program on Faith TV

A new, cutting-edge, political TV show will challenge Islam with biting humor tomorrow night, placing the face of the prophet Muhammad onto a cookie and then having it eaten on camera.

“We’re going to take a stand and say Muhammad’s face is delicious,” said Molotov Mitchell, the 28-year-old incendiary creator and host of “Flamethrower,” a program described as a low-budget, gritty cross between the “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” and “The View” if Ann Coulter were the producer. “This is religious and culinary history in the making.”

The theme of this week’s episode is “All Things Islam,” as panelists take on the faith of Muslims in a no-holds-barred fashion.

“Islam is not even a religion,” Mitchell told WND from a location somewhere in Eastern North Carolina. “It’s an ideology of ‘might makes right’ disguised as a religion. We’re going to show that Allah was with us when we baked this cookie and ate it. Deal with it!”

Mitchell and his fellow panelists – all of whom are Christians in their 20s and whom he calls the next generation of conservatism – are trying to make the point that America is still a free country, and there’s no need to cower in fear from Islamo-fascism. He laments the frequency of Islamic suicide bombings, giving a new twist to a famous line from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” by stating, “Every time a bell rings, a Muhammad gets his wives.”

In recent years, European cartoons featuring Muhammad have caused a tidal wave of violent protests and death threats, as Islamic tradition bans depictions of the prophet.

Molotov Mitchell, the Christian creator of ‘Flamethrower,’ irreverently sinks his teeth into a cookie featuring a depiction of the Muslim prophet Muhammad

“What were doing is exercising our freedom of speech and freedom of the press to the fullest in order to challenge a tyrannical, oppressive system that has doomed the cultures and countries of the Middle East for centuries,” Mitchell told WND. “Now it’s trying to invade our borders, and somebody has to speak up about it.”

In its two previous episodes, “Flamethrower” has taken on subjects including “Is it ethical to kill abortionists?” and “Let’s invade Mexico” – not to stay, but just to get rid of the drug cartels.

There’s also a regular segment titled, “WWMD? (What Would Muhammad Do?)”

In it, cast members dress in traditional Muslim clothing and deliver “totally atrocious” real news items, recounting, says Mitchell, “what some jerk named Muhammad did this week.”

“I’m not going to be hurt and insulted. I’m going to ask people to ignore this,” said Iftekhar Hai, president of United Muslims of America Interfaith Alliance in South San Francisco. “They would dare not do it to any Jewish person, saying ‘the Jews killed Jesus.’ The Jewish lobby would slaughter the Christians if they did that.”

“I don’t think this is part of the American character,” Hai added, “but it has become part of the American tradition to only pick on Muslims.”

Mitchell says politics is the driving force of his show, saying, “The [Christian] church really doesn’t seem to get it when it comes to politics. The church likes to ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ But it often suggests Jesus would hug somebody for every situation, and that’s not what Jesus would do. I’d rather ask, ‘What would George Washington do?’”

A video teaser for the program offers a sample exchange between Mitchell and Fox News host Alan Colmes.

“Muhammad murdered people and he married a 9-year-old. That makes him a murdering pedophile,” said Mitchell. “I don’t think that we should burn the Quran. I’m a Christian environmentalist. We should put that thing to use. I mean, at least get some toilet paper out of it.”

“Your kind of attitude is a really despicable attitude,” responded Colmes.

‘Flamethrower’ features a young cast describing itself as the next generation of conservatism. Mitchell’s 27-year-old wife says she’s “totally fine” with the concept of “Flamethrower.”

“At first, I was a little scared,” she admitted. “But I’m a Christian, and we shouldn’t fear to lose our lives. We’re in America, and we have a free voice here, and we want it to stay that way.”

The hour-long show airs Friday nights on Faith TV on the Sky Angel Network, channel 9708, at 7 p.m. Eastern, and the complete cookie segment is expected to be posted on the video-sharing site YouTube immediately after tomorrow night’s airing.

Mitchell says the show has already been recorded on tape, so it would pointless for any would-be assassin to target him.

“Even if you kill us, the cookie will still be eaten on the air,” he said.

==============================

Gagged! Network censors eating ‘Muhammad’ cookie: Officials: Political stunt not in good taste, but ‘blasphemous’ snack posted on WND (WorldNetDaily, 080125)

Molotov Mitchell, the Christian creator of ‘Flamethrower,’ irreverently eats a cookie featuring a depiction of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Video posted below

A national television network has decided to censor an episode of a new political show featuring self-described Christian “infidels” eating a cookie emblazoned with an image of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

Faith TV made the decision in the wake of WND news coverage about “Flamethrower,” a cutting-edge program whose latest episode originally scheduled for this week deals with “All Things Islam.”

“We’re not going to air it,” said Jim West, president of the Florida-based, Christian network. “We feel this program just goes beyond the bounds of good taste.”

“We appreciate the producer’s attempt at parody and drawing attention to controversial subjects, and we embrace his right under the First Amendment to express his views,” he added. “But it does violate one of our programming philosophy tenets which is not to disparage any world religions.”

The creator and host of the show, Molotov Mitchell, said he understands why the network gave the episode the ax, and was able to joke about it.

“If Faith TV pulls our show, I guess it was Allah’s will. Peace be upon them,” Mitchell clowned. “I’d say the real winner in all this is Muhammad.”

West made it clear his network was not dousing “Flamethrower” entirely, only the episode with the edible prophet.

“We have a responsibility to our affiliates who have FCC licenses,” said West. “We have a programming philosophy we have to live by whether we personally agree with their content or not.”

When asked what specifically bothered him, West said, “Painting Islam with a very broad brush rather than focusing on radical Islamic extremists. I think the other problem was although much was presented in the form of a parody, it was done in a condescending, spiteful manner.”

Mitchell, 28, was complimentary of all the officials at the network, but disagreed with their reasoning.

“With all respect to Faith TV, I think this decision reflects a fundamental problem in the way Christians address pagan religions. The questions Christians should ask themselves are: ‘Is what Molotov and the “Flamethrower” panelists are saying true?’ If so, should we stifle it? And secondly, and I believe most American Christians need to think about this one is: ‘Does Jesus hate Islam?’”

While Faith TV has opted against airing the episode, WND has obtained a clip of the program featuring the cookie being chomped on by Mitchell.

“Not only do we have the Muhammad face on a cookie, but it’s about to be eaten by an infidel – a Christian, no less,” said Mitchell moments before taking a bite.

After sinking his teeth into a portion of what was Muhammad’s beard, Mitchell was asked how it tasted.

“Blasphemous,” he said with a delicious grin.

“That cookie is the bomb!” another panelist is heard saying.

In recent years, European cartoons featuring Muhammad have caused a tidal wave of violent protests and death threats, as Islamic tradition bans depictions of the prophet.

Mitchell says the entire program will soon be posted on the “Flamethrower” website, and, by popular demand, the Muhammad cookies will be made available there as well.

“One fan said if we all told an Islamic joke and ate one cookie a day, Islam would go away forever,” he said.

Despite the temporary setback, Mitchell remains unapologetic when it comes to his view of Islam and Muhammad.

“I don’t think we need to target Islamic extremism as much as we need to understand who Muhammad was,” said Mitchell.

“He was a villain; he killed people; he made a 9-year-old his sex slave; and anyone who questioned him was either killed or enslaved. The problem with Islam is not the extremists – it’s Muhammad. And I think the sooner we wake up to that as Americans, the sooner we can actually win a war on terror.”

Faith TV says it will closely examine every other episode of the show in advance to see if it meets the broadcaster’s standards and practices.

Mitchell says, “I guess we’ll just have to be pretty careful about how we address evil from now on. By the way that’s sarcasm! ...

“One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s always the Christians who are most offended when people speak ill of other religions. We should all pause and ask ourselves who stands to gain if we’re afraid to call a spade a spade – the forces of evil, or the forces of good, and I mean that in an epic, Christian, supernatural sense.”

==============================

Holland ‘governed by fear of Islam’ (UK Telegraph, 080124)

A politician has warned that a “fear of Islam” is governing Holland after he delayed the release of a short film attacking the Koran.

Geert Wilders, 44, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, who compares the Muslim holy book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, sparked government panic after saying the anti-Islam film would be released tomorrow.

As Dutch police prepared for a weekend of riots and Mr Wilders was told by the authorities that he would have to leave country, he launched a new attack on “intolerant” Islam while announcing that his 10-minute film attacking the Muslim faith would be postponed for two weeks.

“If I had announced that I was going to make a film about the fascist character of the Bible would there have been a crisis meeting of Holland’s security forces?” he wrote to the Volkskrant newspaper.

“Would I have received as many death threats as I have done since announcing I was making a film about the Koran? Of course not.”

Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, this week warned of “extensive repercussions from Muslims throughout the globe” if the film was broadcast.

In an attempt to defuse tensions, the Dutch government will tomorrow announce that it will not implement a ban on the Islamic burqa dress.

==============================

Bondage in the Name of Tolerance (townhall.com, 080212)

By Debra J. Saunders

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, endorsed adopting some aspects of Sharia law for Muslims, lest, he told the BBC, British Muslims be forced to choose between “the stark alternatives of culture loyalty and state loyalty.”

Williams’ remarks followed a report in the London Telegraph that the British government has made official the practice of paying welfare benefits for multiple wives in polygamous marriages.

The paper reports there are an estimated 1,000 polygamous marriages in the United Kingdom, although no one is sure how accurate that number is. Polygamy is illegal in the United Kingdom. Yet the British government rewards polygamous families who had married outside the United Kingdom — not with deportation to countries that recognize polygamy, which would make sense — but with extra welfare payments for extra wives.

Great Britain prides itself in its multiculturalism and inclusion. But when the British government subsidizes polygamy and the Anglican leader promotes Sharia, they risk conferring upon extremist Muslim men special status, while relegating Muslim women to second-class status.

Western democracies function because all citizens are deemed to be equal. Polygamy is inherently unequal for women. Period. Yet in the name of tolerance, in a bid to make sure they will not be seen as Islamophobic, they enable discrimination.

The timing of the archbishop’s comments couldn’t be worse. While Williams is enraptured with the rich theological disputes of Muslim scholars, he fails to note that British women are suffering as radical Islamists have been beating up on mainstream Islam.

A new report, “Crimes of the Community, Honor-Based Violence in the U.K.” by the Centre for Social Cohesion, catalogs the horror of forced marriages — often after unwitting girls are sent abroad for a “vacation” — female genital mutilation, domestic abuse and an estimated 10 to 12 honor killings in the United Kingdom each year.

The archbishop tried to soften his position by explaining that he does not want to see “extreme” Sharia punishments (especially against women) endorsed by the British legal system. The Islamic Sharia Council already augments divorce settlements — although the honor-violence report suggests that these panels often shortchange women and try to pressure them into returning to life-threatening marriages.

It’s not only Our Betters in Europe who, in the name of political correctness, become apologists for polygamists. In 2005, then-Canada Prime Minister Paul Martin commissioned a $150,000 study to debunk the notion that same-sex marriages could lead to legalized polygamy — only to watch the three law professors on the panel recommend that Canada repeal its anti-polygamy law. Because: “The parties most likely to suffer from this rule are the left-behind wives.”

If secular Western nations had bedrock values, maybe there would be no need to worry about Values Creep. But when, as the honor-violence report noted, even womens activists defend female genital mutilation, its clear that the only absolute in liberal societies is doubt.

Up against fanatics with barbaric ideologies, we are outgunned. We don’t even care if they want to hurt us.

“If you had a map of the U.K. showing the location of Islamist groups — or terrorist cells — and you had another map showing the incidence of honor-based violence and you overlaid them, you would find that they were a mirror,” noted Nazir Afzal, the Crown prosecutor on honor-based violence.

It makes you wonder if Western nations have a death wish.

==============================

Christian Radio Network Blasts Wisconsin School for Student Cross-Dressing Event (Foxnews, 080407)

REEDSBURG, Wisconsin — An elementary-school event in which kids were encouraged to dress as members of the opposite gender drew the ire of a Christian radio group, whose angry broadcast prompted outraged calls to the district office.

Students at Pineview Elementary in Reedsburg had been dressing in costume all last week as part of an annual school tradition called Wacky Week. On Friday, students were encouraged to dress either as senior citizens or as members of the opposite sex.

A local resident informed the Voice of Christian Youth America on Friday. The Milwaukee-based radio network responded by interrupting its morning programming for a special broadcast that aired on nine radio stations throughout Wisconsin. The broadcast criticized the dress-up day and accused the district of promoting alternative lifestyles.

“We believe it’s the wrong message to send to elementary students,” said Jim Schneider, the network’s program director. “Our station is one that promotes traditional family values. It concerns us when a school district strikes at the heart and core of the Biblical values. To promote this to elementary-school students is a great error.”

Schneider co-hosts “Crosstalk,” a nationally syndicated call-in Christian radio show.

After the program aired, both the school and Reedsburg School District office were flooded with calls complaining about the event.

The response surprised Principal Tammy Hayes, who said no one had raised any objections beforehand. She said a flier detailing Wacky Week had been sent home with children the prior week, and an announcement was also included in teacher newsletters.

The dress-up day was not an attempt to promote cross-dressing, homosexuality or alternative gender roles, district administrator Tom Benson said.

“The promotion of transgenderism — that was not our purpose,” Benson told the Baraboo News Republic. “Our purpose was to have a Wacky Week, mixing in a bit of silliness with our reading, writing and arithmetic.”

The theme for Friday’s dress-up day came from students, Hayes said.

“It’s different every year. They basically present the ideas, and they vote on what they would like from Monday through Friday,” Hayes said. “... They did not mean anything by this day. They were trying to have fun and come up with a fun dress-up day.”

About 40% of the student body dressed up Friday, Hayes estimated, with half portraying senior citizens and half dressing as the opposite sex.

“I can assure you we will not be having this day (again),” Hayes said.

Reedsburg is in southern Wisconsin, about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Madison.

==============================

Political Correctness, Then and Now (townhall.com, 080709)

By Ashley Herzog

As Time magazine’s July 14 cover story acknowledges, Mark Twain was a dangerous man in his day. In a time when the notion of black inferiority was taken for granted, Twain not only suggested that all men are created equal (as his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson did), but also that moral people are capable of transcending racial barriers.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, often called “the Great American Novel,” is the story of a boy who rejects societal values in order to help a slave escape to freedom in Illinois. Since Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, it was no wonder that “people hated the book…Twain himself wrote that the book’s banners considered the novel ‘trash and suitable only for the slums,’” as Time noted.

Unfortunately, most children today will never read Huckleberry Finn, which is still considered by many to be “trash.” A century ago, Huckleberry Finn was censored for challenging slavery and segregation. But today, the controversy boils down to a single word: the runaway slave whom Huckleberry Finn befriends is referred to as “nigger Jim.”

Nevermind the fact that Twain portrayed Jim as intelligent and sensitive, while most of the whites who preface his name with the n-word are redneck ne’er-do-wells. Nevermind that Huck ultimately rejects all institutions that promote slavery, including his church, and helps Jim flee up the Mississippi River. And nevermind that the use of the slur accurately reflected the way many whites talked about blacks at the time—Twain held up a mirror to nineteenth-century society, and society didn’t like it one bit.

None of it matters. In fact, according to the American Library Association, few books have been attacked as often as Huckleberry Finn. Since the public schools have been seized by dumbed-down political correctness, teachers are so worried that someone might hyperventilate at the sight of the n-word that they’ve banned America’s greatest anti-racist novel from the classroom.

Their fear is understandable, since teachers who use the book are often ostracized and punished. Last fall, when a Dallas-area English teacher wrote the n-word word on the chalkboard and tried to engage her class in a discussion about racist labels, she was reprimanded and forced to write a letter of apology—because parents complained that the lesson was “hurtful.”

Just last week, outside the Renton School District office in Washington, protestors chanted “Nigger, nigger, out the door, don’t call us niggers anymore!” As one former student explained, “I was beyond offended…Basically we had a discussion for two weeks about the the n-word, and it was extensive…It was really offensive, really degrading.” She must have missed the passage in which Huck declares that he’d rather go to hell than turn on Jim.

Needless to say, in college classrooms, the Great American Novel isn’t considered so great anymore. In my four years at Ohio University, I was never required to read Huckleberry Finn. Instead, English professors prefer to assign the work of third-rate contemporary authors who whine about how awful their lives in America have been. One popular selection is Killing Rage by Bell Hooks, in which the author declares, “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.” For Hooks, there is no possibility of racial harmony; America is an incurably racist society in which a black man can never get a fair deal, let alone befriend a white man.

Twain demonstrated—both through his writing and his real-life friendship with a former slave—that this doesn’t have to be the case. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson that many children, educated in schools where political correctness reigns supreme, are never going to hear.

==============================

The Black Hole of Extreme Political Correctness (townhall.com, 080712)

by Jonah Goldberg

At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy “has become a black hole” for lost paperwork.

Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, “Excuse me!” That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a “white hole.”

Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the “racially insensitive analogy,” in the words of the Dallas Morning News’ City Hall Blog.

Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger notes that everyone should be “very glad that the central collections office has not become a white hole, a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in. It wouldn’t be fun for Dallas to find itself so near a quasar.”

Maybe so, but speaking metaphorically, if it were a white hole, that might suggest central collections was actually doing its job, ejecting paperwork in a timely fashion.

Call me nostalgic, but there was a time when this sort of stupidity actually generated controversy. Remember the Washington, D.C., official who used the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence only to lose his job? That at least generated debate.

But these days, stories like this vomit forth daily and, for the most part, we roll our eyes, chuckle a bit and shrug them off.

Obviously, there’s something to be said for ignoring the childish grievance-peddling that motivates so much of this nonsense. But the simple fact is that ignoring political correctness has done remarkably little to combat it. Meanwhile, people who make a big deal about it are often cast as the disgruntled obsessive ones.

The only people allowed to take political correctness seriously are the writers for “South Park,” “Family Guy,” “The Simpsons” and the like. Of course, they take it seriously because it’s their bread and butter to mock the absurd pieties of daily life. But nearly everywhere else, the rule of thumb is that we should either defer to this stuff or quietly ignore it.

Now, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. There is stuff that gets labeled political correctness that is entirely defensible. Because of the erosion of traditional authority that has marked the last half-century, for good and ill, society has been forced to re-create what defines good manners largely from scratch. Women, blacks and other historically marginalized groups have finally and deservedly gained an equal place in society. Treating fellow citizens with respect and dignity shouldn’t be lumped in with the more radical agenda that also exploits political correctness.

For example, ditching the word “colored” from the vocabulary when it comes to describing blacks might have been seen as political correctness by many in the 1960s (though the phrase wasn’t widely used), but that in no way means it wasn’t the right thing to do. Or consider the idiots who shouted “iron my shirt” at Hillary Clinton (assuming it wasn’t staged to help Clinton burnish her victim status). That’s not bravely fighting political correctness. It’s just rude and stupid.

But there’s a separate agenda that parasitically clings to the more defensible aim of crafting new good manners. The left uses Western society’s admirable desire not to offend to bludgeon competing ideas and arguments. Inconvenient facts are ridiculed as “insensitive.” Refusal to go along with the multicultural agenda, for example, is cast as a sign of backwardness and bigotry. We’re told we must have a frank conversation about race, but when conservatives take up the challenge, they are immediately demonized for the insensitivity of their honesty.

One of my favorite recent examples is when Newt Gingrich argued last year that bilingualism makes it more difficult for Hispanics to learn English, which has the unfortunate result of leaving some Latinos trapped in the “ghetto.” He was immediately denounced by the usual suspects and forced to issue an apology, which he promptly did.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers was tarred and feathered after merely hypothesizing about the data on cognitive differences between the sexes.

In Britain this week, the National Children’s Bureau advised that day-care centers treat aversion to unfamiliar foreign food by children as “racist.” It was also reported that two children were punished for their bigoted refusal to kneel and pray to Allah in a religion class.

This strikes me as something beyond mere tolerance. This is will-to-power masquerading as tolerance. This sort of thing needs to be resisted, because there is no end to where thinking like this can lead. Indeed, if it doesn’t cause too much offense, one could even say it’s a black hole.

==============================

Carleton students reinstate fundraising for cystic fibrosis (National Post, 081201)

OTTAWA — Carleton University students will continue to raise money for cystic fibrosis research after student councillors held an emergency meeting Monday night and reversed a controversial motion that passed last week.

The Carleton University Students’ Association voted almost unanimously last week to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinerama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease was not “inclusive” enough.

The motion wrongly alleged that cystic fibrosis was “recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.”

Public outcry against the decision, both on campus and around the country, pressured the student association to reconsider its previous decision and convene an emergency meeting.

Two of the councillors involved in drawing up and approving the motion resigned their seats at the boisterous meeting Monday.

Petitions calling for the impeachment of council president Brittany Smyth and other council members were tabled.

Michael Monks, the councillor representing business students, said Monday night’s decision puts the council back in line with the will of the student body.

“The students spoke and we listened,” he said.

Shinerama started in 1964 as a shoe-shining campaign to raise money for cystic fibrosis research during first-year welcoming festivities at universities and colleges in Canada.

Since then, students have raised more than $18.5-million for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Every year, near the beginning of fall classes and during university orientation for new arrivals, students fan out across the city and seek donations from passersby. The fundraiser is carried out by students at about 65 colleges and universities across Canada, and Carleton has been participating for at least 25.

During orientation week this year, Carleton students, who have raised about $1-million over the years, raised about $20,000.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive tract; typically those born with it live only into their 30s.

According to the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, about one in every 3,600 children is born with the disease in Canada, and girls and boys are equally affected.

“Caucasians” have a greater chance of carrying the abnormal gene that causes the disease, but that demographic group includes people in the Middle East, South America, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent, as well as western countries.

==============================

Oxford Junior Dictionary Drops Christian Words (Christian Post, 081211)

[KH: do not buy]

The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has dropped many words associated with Christianity and British history that were found in earlier versions.

Christian-related words like “bishop,” “chapel,” “disciple,” “minister,” “sin,” and “devil,” have been replaced by words like “blog,” “biodegradable,” “MP3 player,” “democratic,” and “celebrity,” in the 2007 edition of the popular children’s dictionary in the United Kingdom.

Although the newest version of the dictionary was released last year, the removal of words went largely unnoticed until Lisa Saunders, a mother of four from Northern Ireland, pointed them out.

She first realized the omission of words during a homework session with her son when couldn’t find “moss” and “fern,” which were in editions up until 2003, but were not included in the 2007 version, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The discovery prompted Saunders to compare entries from the older editions, dating from 1978, 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2003 with the latest junior dictionary.

“I was completely horrified by the vast number of words which have been removed,” she told the Telegraph in London. “We know that language moves on and we can’t be fuddy-duddy about it but you don’t cull hundreds of important words in order to get in a different set of ICT words.”

Vineeta Gupta, the head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press, told the Telegraph the changes were made to reflect a “multicultural” society.

“People don’t go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as ‘Pentecost’ or ‘Whitsun’ would have been in 20 years ago but not now,” he said.

“The Christian faith still has a strong following,” noted Saunders, according to the Telegraph. “To eradicate so many words associated with the Christianity will have a big effect on the numerous primary schools who use it.”

The decision by OUP to discontinue particular words is a form of “verbal engineering,” Erin Manning recently wrote on Beliefnet’s conservative Crunchy Con blog.

Manning cited Catholic moral theologian William Smith as saying, “All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering.”

“Deciding to drop a word that has already fallen out of use, become obsolete, from a dictionary is not a political act,” said Manning on Monday, “but removing words still in everyday use just because you’ve decided they ought not be important in the vocabulary of a modern child most decidedly is.”

The removal of Christianity from Europe will pose consequences for the European Union, said Manning, citing Italian philosopher Marcello Pera.

“You remove the ability to explain coherently both to your own citizens and to those outside just who you are, what you stand for, and what you believe in,” commented Manning.

“Europe didn’t spring into being as a post-modern secularist entity in the late twentieth century, after all; without understanding the rich and storied past, we have no context in which to place the present, or to envision a hopeful future.”

The dictionary was created for children ages 7 and up and includes around 10,000 entries, words and phrases.

==============================

UK Bishop: Church Must Challenge Political Correctness (Christian Post, 100715)

LONDON – Bishop Tom Wright bid farewell to the Diocese of Durham in the United Kingdom Tuesday night with a reminder to the church to stand against political correctness and be the voice of justice for the poor and God’s creation.

Delivering his farewell sermon before his retirement as Bishop of Durham next month, Wright challenged the notion that being interested in social justice meant denying the resurrection of Jesus, while being interested in eternal salvation meant having to treat the world as irrelevant.

He urged Christians to speak out in the face of injustice and give hope to those in difficulty, such as the poor and asylum seekers.

“Some voices are suggesting we should now put the cart before the horse and have the church dance to whichever tunes the government of the day want to play. Not so,” he said. “That is simply to allow the iron law of political correctness to trump the liberating grace of Jesus.”

“The church,” he continued, “must not only work for justice but must challenge the world’s self-serving notions of what justice is and how you get to it. We must do it in relation to genuine compassion and caring for people who get squeezed out, not because we’re following political fashion but because we are to be people of hope – not only people who hope, but people who are the cause of hope in others.”

Wright retires on August 31 to take up a new academic position as research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Durham Cathedral was packed for the service of celebration and farewell, which was joined by local church leaders, including the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, the Rt. Rev. Seamus Cunningham.

Wright paid tribute to the positive change in ecumenical climate among local church leaders in the last few decades. He said Christians needed to learn “how not to please ourselves” but make room for one another and live in harmony.

“It is fatally easy to squeeze out or sneer at people who for whatever reason appear not to fit our model,” he said. “And when we do that, we more or less guarantee that they will not be able to hear, let alone believe, the message about Jesus that we preach.”

“It’s fatally easy to imagine that all my prejudices are theological convictions and that all your theological convictions are mere prejudices,” he added. “That’s not to say that there aren’t such things as genuine convictions and prejudices, only that it’s often difficult to sort out which is which.”

He admitted that welcoming others was not easy and that Christians still needed to be able to tell the difference between the “differences that make a difference and the differences that don’t make a different.”

“Paul writes enthusiastically about overcoming the barriers put up by our ethnic backgrounds, but he also writes elsewhere about destructive patterns of behavior which destroy Christian fellowship and which cannot be treated as differences of opinion to be overcome by a fuzzy ‘inclusivity,’” he said.

Wright acknowledged that the diocese had faced hardship in recent years with cuts in clergy numbers but paid special thanks to parish clergy having to look after two, three or even up to seven parishes simultaneously because of shortages.

He appealed to them to be a people of hope rooted in Jesus and not “collapse into mere optimism or a grinning denial of reality.”

Other guests at the farewell service included the Vice Chancellor of Durham University, Professor Chris Higgins, and the Mayor of Durham, Councillor Mamie Simmons.

==============================

I’m Politically Incorrect (townhall.com, 101110)

John Stossel

This week, I held a bake sale — a racist bake sale. I stood in midtown Manhattan shouting, “Cupcakes for sale.” My price list read:

Asians — $1.50

Whites — $1.00

Blacks/Latinos — 50 cents

People stared. One yelled, “What is funny to you about people who are less privileged?” A black woman said, angrily, “It’s very offensive, very demeaning!” One black man accused me of poisoning the cupcakes.

I understand why people got angry. What I did was hurtful to some. My bake sale mimicked what some conservative college students did at Bucknell University. The students wanted to satirize their school’s affirmative action policy, which makes it easier for blacks and Hispanics to get admitted.

I think affirmative action is racism — and therefore wrong. If a private school like Bucknell wants to have such policies to increase diversity, fine. But government-imposed affirmative action is offensive. Equality before the law means government should treat citizens equally.

But it doesn’t. Our racist government says that any school receiving federal tax dollars, even if only in the form of federal aid to students, must comply with affirmative action rules, and some states have enacted their own policies.

Advocates of affirmative action argue it is needed because of historic discrimination. Maybe that was true in 1970, but it’s no longer true. Affirmative action is now part of the minority special privilege machine, an indispensable component of which is perpetual victimhood.

All the Bucknell students wanted was a campus discussion about that. Why not? A university is supposed to be a place for open discussion, but some topics are apparently off-limits.

About an hour after the students began their “affirmative action” sale, the associate dean of students shut it down. He said it was because the prices charged were different from those listed on the permissions application. An offer to change the prices was rejected. Then the club’s application to hold another sale was rejected. Ironically, the associate dean said it would violate the schools nondiscrimination policy! He would authorize a debate on affirmative action, but nothing else.

How ridiculous! Fortunately, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has come to the students’ defense. “Using this absurd logic, Bucknell would have to require its College Democrats to say nothing political on campus unless they give equal time to Republican candidates at their events, or its Catholic Campus Ministry to remain silent about abortion unless it holds a debate and invites pro-choice activists to speak,” FIRE’s Adam Kissel said. “While students are free to host debates, they must not be required to provide a platform for their ideological opponents. Rather, those opponents must be free to spread their own messages and host their own events.”

Right. My affirmative action cupcake “event” led to some interesting discussions. One young woman began by criticizing me, “It’s absolutely wrong.” But after I raised the parallel with college admissions, she said: “No race of people is worth more than another. Or less.”

But do you believe in affirmative action in colleges? I asked.

“I used to,” she replied.

Those are the kind discussions students should have.

Affirmative action wasn’t the only issue that brought conservative Bucknell students grief. When they tried to protest President Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus” spending last year by handing out fake dollar bills, the school stopped them for violating rules against soliciting! According to FIRE, Bucknell’s solicitation policy covers only sales and fundraising, which the students were not engaged in, but the school rejected the students’ appeal, saying permission was needed to distribute “anything, from Bibles to other matter.” Absurd! The Bucknell administration tells me it stopped the anti-stimulus protest because the students had not registered to use that busy campus space. FIRE disputes that.

“Distributing protest literature is an American free-speech tradition that dates to before the founding of the United States,” Kissel said. “Why is Bucknell so afraid of students handing out ‘Bibles (or) other matter’ that might provide challenging perspectives? Colleges are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas, but Bucknell is betraying this ideal.”

It is, indeed. Why are America’s institutions of higher learning so fearful?

==============================

Politically Correct in China: Homosexuals Yes, Christians No (Christian Post, 110727)

By Chuck

An unstated, yet obvious goal of American policy toward China is to make the People’s Republic more like us. The Chinese are, for a host of reasons, resistant to that idea.

They want our money and they crave our expertise, but apart from these, there are few things made in America, especially our values, that they care to make their own.

But there is one exception. Unfortunately.

Lu Liping is one of the most popular and respected Chinese actresses. She won the 2010 Best Actress award at the Golden Horse Festival, the Chinese-language equivalent of the Oscars. Despite her popularity and critical acclaim, she is a persona non grata at the 2011 awards to be held in Taiwan.

That’s because on her blog, Lu, an evangelical Christian, linked to comments made by a Chinese pastor in Rochester, New York, on the subjects of same-sex marriage and homosexuality. In it, the pastor said that “even if some day, the law makes it illegal for me to speak against homosexuality, I will continue to preach: Homosexuality is a sin. God loves sinners, but he hates sin! Believe in Jesus, gain victory over your sin, and move from Death to Life.”

Lu’s link and her own approving comments set off a firestorm in the press on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. A newsreader on Shanghai television denounced Lu and said that “Gay people, like us, have the right to exist and develop themselves in society, and this right should not be overtaken by any other concept.”

The China Daily has had a great time chronicling the controversy and quoting Lu’s critics. It told readers that “on the bright side, top Chinese celebrities from both sides of the straits have also been coming out against homophobia.”

All of this has the Economist magazine wondering if China will develop as rapidly in the area of gay rights as it has in other areas.

Overlooked in all of these good feelings is the fact that both the newsreader and the writers at the China Daily are government employees. “Government,” as in the Chinese Communist Party.

That’s the same Chinese Communist Party that has killed countless Tibetans and persecuted Christians and other religious minorities. The same government that has compiled one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Whatever reasons the Party might have for allowing its media outlets to pile on Lu over her beliefs, only a fool would think that it has anything to do with human rights, gay or otherwise.

Why the Chinese government would insist that gay rights should not be “overtaken by any other concept” especially not religious freedom, shouldn’t be hard to understand. It sees religious freedom as a threat to it power, whereas letting people beat up on Lu creates the illusion of a respect for freedom.

That’s why the Chinese are okay with this Western import. Allowing celebrities their bit of politically correct posturing helps divert attention from the regime’s crimes.

This is lost on those Westerners for whom gay rights is the measure of freedom. People who have remained silent as China made life miserable for religious and ethnic minorities are thrilled over the rhetorical support for their favorite minority.

==============================

Campus Crusade for Christ Loses Donors Over Name Change (Christian Post, 110804)

Campus Crusade for Christ’s name change to “Cru” has forced a number of donors to withdraw their support from the ministry.

While the exact number has not been specified, Mike Adamson, director of Communications for CCC, told The Christian Post that only “a very small percentage” of donors have pulled out.

CCC is one of the largest and most prominent Christian organizations in the world with more than 25,000 full-time staff. The Orlando, Fla.-based ministry announced last month that it would be dropping its 60-year-old name and adopting “Cru” instead, starting in early 2012.

For some, the name change has come as a shock.

Ken Connor, chairman of the Center for a Just Society and who was once involved in CCC, believes the ministry is making the change to avoid offending people with such words as “crusade” and “Christ.” He’s calling on the organization to rethink its decision and not leave Christ out.

But Steve Sellers, vice president of CCC, has maintained that the new name had “absolutely nothing to do with being politically correct.”

“We didn’t decide to take Christ out of our name; we decided to change our name in order to be more effective at reaching people for Christ,” he said on Fox News.

Sellers further pointed out that the new logo contains a cross, thus showing that they are not bowing to political correctness or being ashamed of the Gospel.

The issue with the old name is not “Christ,” but rather “campus” and “crusade,” CCC leaders have said.

“Crusade” carries negative associations and “campus” does not adequately represent all of CCC’s ministries.

Besides the college campus movement, other CCC ministries include FamilyLife, Here’s Life Inner City, and the JESUS Film Project.

While some have speculated that “Cru” is an abbreviated version of “crusade,” the new name does not hold any specific meaning. It is simply a nickname that was coined on an unknown campus in the mid-90s and spread to other campuses over the next decade.

“Interestingly, it does not carry any of the negative baggage of the word ‘crusade,’” said Adamson. “It’s used in the most challenging environment of the university campus without the historical connotations.”

CCC leaders are hoping that Cru will come to gain a certain meaning much like other abstract names such as Google and Starbucks have.

But some of CCC’s ministry partners consider the change a mistake and have chosen not to partner any longer, Adamson said.

Notably, influential evangelical John Piper has come to the ministry’s defense.

He contended in a blog post that “the Christ-exalting faithfulness” of a church or ministry should not be judged by the absence of “Jesus” or “Christ” or “Christian” in the name.

The Minneapolis pastor went further to say, “In my judgment Campus Crusade seems to be more doctrinally awake and sound today than in decades gone by. But in the end that is not decisive when it comes to whether I would support any particular Crusade staff. What the staff believes is decisive in the end.”

“Therefore, I encourage you: Don’t drop your support from Crusade staff simply because the organization made a decision you disagree with. That would be like saying to a fellow-soldier on the frontlines: I’m not giving you any fire-cover because I don’t like the new name the Colonel gave to your unit. Is the soldier faithful and fruitful? That is the decisive issue.”

Despite some backlash and loss of support, Adamson said the majority of CCC’s ministry partners are excited about “the opportunity to more effectively proclaim the name of Jesus without the difficulties of the words ‘Crusade’ and ‘Campus.’”

He acknowledged that some are not fond of the name choice, but stressed that they “trust our track record and know that the staff they support are faithful and fruitful.”

In the U.S., 57,000 college students attend weekly CCC meetings or small groups and all are being encouraged to grow in their faith and share their faith. Over the least two years, the organization has sent more than 7,000 students on short-term missions projects. And during the last five years, nearly 600,000 students have made decisions for Christ.

“In the last several years we are experiencing some of our greatest results,” Adamson commented.

While the organization prepares to formally adopt its new name next year, Adamson made it clear that their goal remains the same: “to effectively proclaim the gospel and to give more people the chance to say ‘Yes’ to Jesus.”

When asked to what extent Christians should adapt to changing times, he commented, “Just as Jesus took on flesh out of love, we must look for ways to communicate that which never changes inside cultures that are always changing via geography and generations. May God give us all the sacrificial love for the lost to look for every Christ exalting way possible for them to hear about Him.”

==============================