Fellow Members:
I premise this thread by wishing
everyone a pleasant holiday season! Especially those (everyone at
TechIMO of course!) who cherish peace, life, and mutual respect, overtly expressed.
The following is taken from a Wall Street Journal Editorial dated 12/20/02. There was a similar thread a few days ago, and I had promised to contribute something relevant, though this essay is not precisely "on point." I find this entire debate interesting and thought perhaps many here would as well. Thank goodness we live in a country where different ideas can be put on the public table for discussion.
Quote:
Festival of Fights: How the Grinch stole Hanukkah. Usually when the grinch comes 'round to public squares this time of year, he's gunning for Nativity displays. But this holiday season he seems to have taken aim at menorahs. So much so that it took a stay issued by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens--affirmed by the full court earlier this week--to overcome a Cincinnati ordinance preventing two Jewish organizations from putting up a menorah on a downtown public square.
Nor is Cincinnati the only town having a menorah controversy. New Jersey alone had two such towns this year. In Fair Lawn, a rabbi unsuccessfully petitioned the town to put a menorah on the Borough Hall's lawn, which does have a "holiday" display. In Watchung, the news was more encouraging news as city fathers finally agreed to allow a menorah to go up after having argued that a Christmas tree in one square was not really a Christmas tree at all but a "tree of lights" serving as part of a commemoration of Pearl Harbor.
Yeah, right.
In fairness, the Supreme Court's two major decisions on these kinds of displays have not been easy for mayors and town councils to parse. The gist is that a town cannot put up, say, only a creche, as if it were endorsing one religion over all others. But the court has never spelled out a precise formula, which has resulted in all manner of legal cartwheels. "There's a huge misconception out there," says Richard Garnett of the University of Notre Dame Law School, "that the Establishment Clause requires citizens to have to lie about their religious symbols to gain entry to the public square."
The result is that beleaguered city lawyers spend their time trying to figure out how close the candy canes must be to the Baby Jesus or how many snowmen it takes to sanitize a menorah. And we laugh at the medieval philosophers for debating how many angels can fit on a pinhead.
Kevin Hasson of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has successfully defended towns displaying creches and menorahs in two important cases, argues for a more common-sense approach. For Mr. Hasson the real test of context is not just what a town puts up on its lawn in December but what cultural expressions the town square reflects over the course of a year, on holidays from Valentine's and Columbus Day to Ramadan. "Religion and culture should be viewed like ethnicity and culture," he says. "We don't, for example, entertain suits by Anglophiles seeking to enjoin St. Patrick's Day parades."
How silly these annual disputes have become. It strikes us that when the Founding Fathers took care to write freedom of religion into the Constitution they didn't have in mind the kind of stealth Christmas or Hanukkah displays we see now, called by other names. Secularists like to cite Jefferson, author of the Establishment Clause, on the separation of church and state. But surely a Jefferson who attended church services in the House of Representatives and permitted them in executive offices during his administration would have to wonder about a state of affairs where the only acceptable sacred symbol is one stripped of its meaning.
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Brangwen
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