Christmas is Offensive

The Associated Press reports from Chicago:

A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says. Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the German Christkindlmarket, to reconsider using a movie studio as a sponsor because it is worried ads for its film "The Nativity Story" might offend non-Christians.

As usual, please note that there is no indication that any person actually has been "offended," or even has lodged a protective Notice of Anticipatory Intent to Take Offense. Of course, the reasonableness of any such hypothetical claim is not a factor.

We may have reached an important point of moral clarity: Christmas is per se offensive to almost everyone.

As we enter that joyous season when vaguely Christian-inspired activities originally associated with actual religious belief terrorize America, it is well to understand that this reaction is only a special case of the application of well-developed tenets of the Established Church of Fundamentalist Secular Orthodoxy.

First, any identifiable group is entitled to special consideration, and the imposition of its will on others, upon a claim of offense or perception of insufficient sensitivity on the part of another.

Second, Christians, men, and white people, while identifiable as groups, are not only ineligible to make such complaints, but are disabled from asserting merely equal rights. See the recent unexplained eviction of Christian groups from the campuses of Georgetown University and the University of Michigan, and the hysterical opposition of academic officials to statutes that would prohibit discrimination in college and law school admissions against white men.

Third, Jews are a special case. Jews are permitted to call attention to egregious antisemitic speech (such as that routinely spewed by Islamist clerics, Black Muslims, and the United Nations), and even violent conduct, and Officials of the Established Church have been directed to take notice, but nothing whatever is actually to be done. Moreover, after a decent interval (say, ten minutes) Important Experts are to convene a discussion of what the filthy Jews have done this time to provoke the peaceloving peoples of the world.

Fourth, any expression of "religious belief" is by definition hateful, offensive, and unfit for public display. For this purpose, Scientology, Wiccan, and all "belief traditions" of eastern origin are deemed not to be "religious," since everyone knows they're so ridiculous no one actually believes them. This principle is sometimes simplified as "Jews and Christians should shut the Hell up."

So be careful out there.

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