Muscular Christians Flex Their Muscles

Denver-area churches decided that the official, government-sanctioned secularization of the Christmas holiday had gone too far recently when the city's mayor decided to replace the traditional "Merry Christmas" banner atop the local City and County Building with a "Happy Holidays" greeting and the organizers of the local Christmas parade denied permission for a local church to participate. Christians around the city rose up in protest by descending on the city's annual Christmas parade and sang carols emphasizing the Christian origins of the celebration, as noted in this surprisingly sympathetic account in yesterday's New York Times.

"Like a spark in dry tinder," the Times reported, "the result was a flare-up that caught even some church leaders by surprise. A holiday rite that had drawn thousands of paradegoers annually suddenly became a symbol, for many Christians, of secular society run amok."

A December 4 Denver Post story reported that approximately a thousand people gathered to sing religious Christmas songs before the start of the parade, as a peaceful protest against the decision by the Downtown Denver Partnership, the private, nonprofit group that stages the parade, not to allow a local church, the Arvada, Colorado, Faith Bible Chapel, to have a float in the parade. According to a December 5 Denver Post story, the partnership had "cited a longstanding policy against overtly religious and political themes" in refusing to allow the church to have a float in the parade.

The December 4 Post story noted that local resident "Steve Schweitzberger carried a basket with a tiny baby Jesus doll inside that had a paper teardrop falling from its eye. The baby came with a sign that read, 'It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to.'"

The Faith Bible Chapel, which seems to have had a large part in sparking the reaction, is led by a former Marine who served in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, as the Times article reported. The article said members of his church described him as "not a man who likes getting pushed around," a description suggesting him as a throwback to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American idea of "muscular Christianity."

The Times article noted that the parade's organizers promised to reevaluate their policies and said the event may never be the same.

An additional December 4 Denver Post story noted that smaller, local parades in Colorado Springs and Boulder were to take place that evening, with Christian groups well-represented, including a gingerbread Nativity scene on display in Boulder. The story quoted the director of the Colorado Springs celebration as saying, "We try to be inclusive and represent the entire community.… But you have to realize what is the vast majority of the community, and they need to be included, as well."

AS THE COLORADO STORIES show, a liberal society certainly has room for reasonably inclusive expressions of its people's religious faith, and it seems clear enough that a local Christmas celebration, with the community allowed, and not required, by the government to acknowledge and commemorate the essential religious nature of the occasion, definitely falls into that category.

Likewise, refusing to acknowledge Christmas in a sign mentioning the "holiday" season in a majority-Christian community naturally strikes Christians as a slight, and when the government is the one putting up the sign, it sends the majority of the public a very unfriendly message. In such cases, it is important to recognize that the maintenance of civil peace requires that a community reflect fundamental realities such as people's religious beliefs, lest citizens come to see the government as an open adversary.

Even the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union agrees, to the point of recently saying that it's all right for public schools to have overtly Christian Christmas carols in school activities, according to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune. "Christmas songs about Christ are fine at this time of year, [IACLU] spokesman Ed Yohnka said," the Tribune story noted. That sounds quite different from the position typically staked out by the national American Civil Liberties Union.

BUT NOT ALL THE news is good: a local suburban Chicago school, in a decision representative of policies in many schools across the nation, sponsored last week a very "inclusive" Christmas celebration that entirely excluded any mention of Jesus Christ, as documented in the Tribune story mentioned above.

Some muscular local Christians quickly raised a fuss, led by the Illinois Family Institute working with the national Alliance Defense Fund, and although the school's district superintendent denied any intent behind the omission and "said his teachers did nothing wrong this year," he added that "he would review the holiday programs next year to make sure Christians are not perceived to be slighted," according to the Tribune report.

Obviously, much work remains for "muscular Christians" around the nation in ensuring that local governments don't show disdain, accidentally or otherwise, for the most deeply held beliefs of the majority of their citizens. It's interesting to see that the people we hire to run our public schools are in some cases more radical about excluding religion than even the local ACLU chapter is.

As the Illinois Family Institute and Alliance Defense Fund have observed, it is essential that the public hold these people accountable for their actions and make sure that the public schools' programs and curricula truly reflect the beliefs of the persons who pay for this vital and highly expensive public service. Overall, a more sensible approach to state- and local-level church-state issues must start with the simple recognition that there is a big difference between establishing a coercive state religion and simply acknowledging and recognizing the religious beliefs of the vast majority of a community's population.

"We try to be inclusive and represent the entire community.… But you have to realize what is the vast majority of the community, and they need to be included, as well."

This is totally bullshi'ite. The majority was denied as the town is majority Christian. One of the groups INVITED, not just "allowed" was a homosexual native indian advocacy group. How's that for minority/majority identity crisis.

If these bozos cannot tell that the makeup of Denver is slightly more Christian than homosexual indian cross dressers I suspect they do not get out much. I also suspect that they hang out with some seriously strange people.

This was a direct attack on Christianity by those opposed to that religion, using their government powers illegally to suppress a religion. They should be judged in court, fired along with the Mayor and most of the staff and the city should make restitution to the citizens for it's obvious unconstitutional excesses and abuse of power.

Maybe the revelation by the ACLU has something to do with this:

In 1976, Congress passed the Civil Rights Attorneys Fee Awards Act, which was designed to encourage private lawyers to take on suits to protect civil and constitutional rights. The law provides that judges can order federal and state governments to pay legal fees to private lawyers who sued the government and won. The result has been a flood of civil rights cases in federal court. From The New American Feb. 2, 1987

It's an outrage that US law, passed during the Watergate era, allows the ACLU to collect attorney's fees for makework----Christian-hatng lawsuits it itself launches.

That means "values voters" have been footing the bill for the ACLU's launching a juggernaut to remove Ten Commandments images, Christmas creches and Christmas carols, taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, and because they claim they have a civil right not to see the Ten Commandments, a civil right not to hear the word “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, not to see a creche of the Baby Jesus, not to hear Christmas carols. The ACLU has collected a huge amount of our tax dollars in this left-handed fundraiser for the ACLU.

FReepers can silence the ACLU with a bit of activism. We need to insist our Congressmen repeal this abusive law that allows the ACLU to get rich on harassing Christian America. Congress must repeal laws enabling the ACLU's Christian-hating activities. Cut off the ACLU's funds and watch them disappear. Here's what we can do.

The IRS should determine whether the ACLU is properly accounting for all its tax-funded activities, whether it is inflating legal costs, and whether it is using tax dollars for the purposes stated. We need to know whether the ACLU is engaged in Enron-style accounting and spending practices.

REFERENCE SOURCE FOR ARGUING REPEAL TO CONGRESS

Apparently, when Congress contemplated the fee-shifting bill three decades ago, it never conceived that 42 U.S.C. §1988 would be used to secure fees in esoteric battles over the meaning of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The statute gives a court "discretion" to award attorneys' fees to the prevailing party in civil rights cases.

Study of the legislative history of the statute reveals that Congress intended this statute to apply to civil rights abuses, including certain race and sex discrimination cases, but not to arguments about whether Judge Roy Moore is allowed to display the Ten Commandments in the Alabama courthouse.

During the deliberations on the bill, the Senate penned that "in many cases arising under our civil rights laws, the citizen who must sue to enforce the law has little or no money with which to hire a lawyer."[6] In the recent First Amendment lawsuits filed by the ACLU, the tables are turned.

Small school districts and municipalities can either defend lawsuits and risk paying the ACLU's attorneys' fees if they lose, or they can voluntarily submit to the ACLU's view of the Constitution.

Even if lawsuits over the establishment clause somehow fall within 42 U.S.C. §1988, the statute empowers courts with nothing more than "discretion" to award fees.

In these cases, one would expect courts to withhold awarding fees. Since this is not happening, Congress must take immediate action to clarify 42 U.S.C. §1988 to explicitly exclude lawsuits related to the acknowledgement of God.

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The ACLU was founded on January 12, 1920. Among its founders were William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis F. Budenz. All three later became prominent leaders of the Communist Party, USA, although Budenz broke with the Party in 1945 and became a militant anti-Communist.

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