Their Goal is Really To Make Us Hate Christmas

Religious conservatives are threatening lawsuits and boycotts to insist that store clerks and advertisements say "Merry Christmas." Countering are those who argue they are being inclusive and inoffensive with the secular "Happy Holidays."
-Reuters, 12/18/05


I feel like a fool even responding to their bait. But I've learned a lesson from the time Senator Kerry did not respond to the unethical attacks on his character by swift boat veterans (none of whom actually served with him on a swift boat.) There was a time in American culture when one didn't dignify an insult by responding to it. Not anymore. Right wing attacks have taken on the strategy of obnoxious kids who keep banging pots, screaming and kicking till they get somebody's attention.

I don't quite understand yet, although I'm trying very hard, to understand the sick egotism of the Christian right. They love to be persecuted, or to think they are being persecuted, (they think it's their road to heaven, and so they're paving it!)at the same time they love to think they are in charge. It's a strange psychological condition. It has zero to do with living out the principles of Christ's teaching, that's obvious. They probably don't even realize it, but their mission to force us all to say "Merry Christmas" is weirdly control-freakish. They also don't realize that it makes the rest of us loathe them and disrespect them even more, which feeds into their persecution complex. That persecution complex has been growing steadily among the ranks of conservatives, then mainstream Republicans, for decades now. In recent years, especially when one of their -- Bush -- took the White House -- it has become their "onward Christian soldier" mantra...that they are under attack by the rulers, even after they have become the rulers. President Bush himself exhibits the characteristics of someone who is being "picked on" every time he deigns to answer a reporter's question. That, magnified, is the faux Christians, whom I like to call the hypoChristians whole take on their faith.

It's no wonder an evangelical U.S. President says, "You're either for us or against us" when so many evangelicals say, "You're either saved or not saved." Lines are drawn. You're either good or evil. And now that they've got a whiff of their own power, they're forcing down our throats what to say and do.

It's not all about Christmas. It's about their endless hunger to boss everyone else around and call it Christianity. It's the crusades, not Francis of Assisi. It's the Ten Commandments, not the Beatitudes. And it's pure Philistinism, chest thumping braggarts so pissy and self-satisfied that they've got, not a log, but a whole forest of lumber in each eye.

"Merry Christmas" doesn't appear in any sacred book either.