Forty elementary school students at The International School at Dundee yesterday performed "The Rainbow Christmas," a play that promotes tolerance and diversity.
Y'know, I personally do not put much stock into the so-called "war" (a pretty strong term) on Christmas; however, I can certainly see where those who are a bit cheesed at the ever-creeping political correctness into the Christmas season are coming from. Just like the article above, for instance.
Debbie Kendrick's second-grade class and Gene Schmidt's fourth-grade class performed the play in front of a schoolwide audience. The message of the play coincides with the school's values of fostering a society of acceptance among people of different beliefs and cultures, Schmidt said."We need to be open-minded and tolerant of everybody, no matter what their beliefs are and where they're from," Schmidt said.
OK, but how does infusing this "need" into a Christmas song actually demonstrate "tolerance" and "diversity"? Either you believe in Christmas or you don't. Singing about Christmas doesn't infringe on anyone else's belief system, and if [some] people are offended by a Christmas song it is THEY who need to be more tolerant, not everyone else. (The play did emphasize racial tolerance and all that jazz... as if THAT is in any short supply in America's public schools ... but regardless, infusing that into a Christmas celebration is just PC. Imagine if the same message were incorporated into a Hanukkah or Kwanzaa tune!)
Folks like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson may be overstating their case, but how silly is it for stores and/or companies to prohibit people from saying "Merry Christmas"? Gibson's book alone points out how
... in Illinois, state government workers were forbidden from saying the words "Merry Christmas" while at work;In Rhode Island, local officials banned Christians from participating in a public project to decorate the lawn of City Hall;
A New Jersey school banned even instrumental versions of traditional Christmas carols;
Arizona school officials ruled it unconstitutional for a student to make any reference to the religious history of Christmas in a class project.
I'm not one who would argue that we ought to Grinch our way out of this discomfort by aggressively de-Christmafying. And to the extent that the war-on-Christmas crowd is simply reacting to knee-jerk political correctness, I'm with them. It's idiotic to call the Capitol conifer a Holiday Tree -- as it has been for the past several years, until it was re-, um, christened this year. If, as Gibson reports, the Plano, Tex., schools really have an edict banning red-and-green decorations (was it either color or just the combination?) -- well, you don't have to be Christian to find this more than a little silly.
But there is an ugly, bullying aspect to this dispute, in which the pro-Christmas forces are not only asking, reasonably, that their religion be treated with equal status and respect but in which they are attacking legitimate efforts at inclusivity. It's this sense of aggrieved victimhood that confuses me: What, exactly, is so threatening about calling the school holiday a winter break rather than Christmas vacation?