Christmas Wars Not Quite Over

Did you think that all the debates and complaints over Christmas were over for another year? Not quite! You may remember Christian Right leaders lying about a school secularizing the lyrics to Silent Night. This school caught a lot of grief over this and spent a lot of money defending themselves against the lies, so they are demanding an apology and reimbursement.

Americans United reports:

The Dodgeville School District has demanded that Liberty Counsel issue a public apology for a press release it issued in early December claiming that Ridgeway Elementary School officials had secularized the lyrics to numerous religious songs, such as “Silent Night,” in the school’s holiday programs. The district is also asking for $23,899.48 in compensation for costs that officials incurred in refuting the lies about their community.

“Your dissemination of false and misleading information and your threats of specious and frivolous litigation resulted in enormous cost the district,” wrote school attorney Eileen A. Brownlee, in a letter last week to Liberty Counsel. “You have yet to present the facts either through a press release, one of your ‘alerts’ or through any other means. You used this red herring to attempt to collect money through the form of donations.”

Liberty Counsel, headed by Mat Staver, is the group that conducted the “Friend of Foe” campaign where they created an “enemies list” of groups and people who refused to endorse an exclusively conservative Christians vision of the Christmas holidays. The “debate” created by the Liberty Council, both with this case in particular and with Christmas generally, is a lot like the “debate” created by defenders of Intelligent Design: there is no genuine debate, just a fake debate cooked up through misinformation and deception by people who are unwilling to deal with reality.

Dodgeville Superintendent Diane Messer hopes Liberty Counsel will do the right thing. “I would like to believe that given their Christian basis, that somebody there would realize right is right,” she told the Wisconsin State Journal. “And since they used their actions as part of their fundraising campaign certainly something should be forthcoming. If nothing more than a token of compensation for what they unfairly subjected us to.”

I think that the chances of the Liberty Council doing the “right” thing is about as likely George W. Bush converting to Islam.

 

Read More:

• Christmas Wars: Recent News
• Christmas Wars: Overview, Rebuttal
• What do Atheists do During Christmas Holidays?
• Should Atheists Ignore Christmas?
• Are Atheists and Secularists Undermining Christmas?
• Is Jesus the Reason for the Season?
• Sources of Christmas Traditions, Modern and Ancient
• Are the Gospels Reliable About Jesus' Birth?
• Should Parents Perpetuate the Santa Claus Myth?
• Christmas Symbols, Christmas Holidays
• Christmas: Religious or Secular?
• Bah Humbug! Arguing Against Christmas