Smells Like Christmas Spirit

[ck4829]

It’s mid-November, and we are well into this year’s “War on Christmas,” the seasonal campaign in which a melodramatically aggrieved Right—occupying a fantasy world where we’re not all surrounded by Christmas music and commerce—claims that Christianity is under attack, pointing to retailers that say “Happy Holidays” and the decoration regimes of a handful of small-time local administrators.

Yesterday morning, for example, the American Family Association sent an alert to its members warning that Lowe’s was selling Christmas trees without using the word “Christmas” enough in its catalog. “Lowe's evidently did not want to offend any non-Christians, therefore they replaced ‘Christmas tree’ with ‘Family tree.’ Of course, if Christians are offended that is evidently ok,” sniffed AFA. (AFA retracted the alert later in the day after assurances from Lowe’s that “Christmas trees” would appear in its advertising.)

Long before 2005, when Fox News host John Gibson penned a book on how it was all a “liberal plot,” right-wing commentators have reached for a conspiracy theory that would place such petty gripes in a context they would be able to use to attack their political opponents, and this year is no different.

Last week the American Family Association pounced on a nursing home in Plant City, Florida, where a decoration policy stopped “an 85-year-old grandmother” from putting up her mistletoe. This small-city nursing home claimed that it was following federal guidelines from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, leading AFA to conclude, “Their tradition is now banned by the federal government.”

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2007/11/smells_like_chr.html

[Recursion]

1. You would think they would be happy that the Federal government...

... is "banning" a pagan tradition that was used as a symbol of resistance against Christianization. Go figure.