Frederick Meekins -- Happy Tolerance Day

By Frederick Meekins
December 16, 2002
NewsWithViews.com

That’s right --- “Happy Tolerance Day.” Use to be this time of year Americans greeted one another with a hearty “Merry Christmas”. However, if the minions of political correctness continue to foist their intellectual swill upon the nation’s culture, the Yuletide season will come to symbolize something else entirely.

On “The O’Reilly Factor”, Bill recently confronted feminist agitator Patricia Ireland about Planned Parenthood’s “Choice On Earth” holiday cards. Ireland responded by saying, “I can’t think of a better time of year to remind everyone of the need for tolerance among the major religious groups and among individuals.”

Planned Parenthood concurred with Ireland’s assessment in a statement posted on the group’s website concluding, “Planned Parenthood believes in every individual’s right to make choices and live in peace with our planet and wishes people of all beliefs a peaceful and safe holiday season.” If NOW and Planned Parenthood hags are out fostering a spirit of diversity and tolerance throughout this festive period, I’d hate to see an organization imposing a uniformity of thought.

These groups and their liberal sympathizers are out to promote something this Christmas. But it’s definitely not goodwill and human understanding, especially if tolerance and inclusion mean celebrating ideas you don’t necessarily agree with as multiculturalists harp ad nauseam.

Planned Parenthood said of the arm of the American Life League publicizing the scandal of these blasphemous Advent placards, “...this organization ... serves no redeeming purpose.” If Planned Parenthood really “believes in every individual’s right to make choices” who are they to say an organization serves no redeeming purpose when the ethical standards endorsed by the abortion crowd are reducible to the pragmatics of relativistic individualism?

As with its other varieties, it seem the Christmas brand of tolerance does not apply to those embracing America’s traditional Christian values either.

One New Jersey school cancelled a trip to see A Christmas Carol --- talk about a bunch of Scrooges --- because Christian references might offend non-Christian students. Should the same degree of concern be shown to the sensibilities of Caucasian students disturbed by the unbridled racial histrionics allowed to run rampant all February long and for much of January and March for that matter?

The school’s spineless principal told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that this literary classic “did not mesh with the class’ curriculum [no doubt because Dickens being a dead white male].” and “there is a great sensitivity to putting students in awkward situations.” Wonder if these mental sensors will be as quick to cut sex-ed and evolution from Biology class.

This prejudice has taken on such ridiculous proportions that these Grinches have metastasized beyond the holiday’s outrightly religious message to take offense at its symbols once providing a great deal of aesthetic joy.

According to Robert Knight in the Nov/Dec. 2002 issue of Family Voice, this hatred towards God and all things holy runs so deep that many retailers refuse to place stars atop their display trees as a conscientious effort to thumb their noses at the King of Kings. Even Chick-fil-a, the fast food chicken chain that makes a self-righteous spectacle of itself by closing every Sunday, barely acknowledges the existence of Christmas.

In Pittsburgh, concerned residents there had to fight to get annual December celebrations re-upgraded to a generic “holiday” status. Humbugs in that Pennsylvania metropolis had reduced the Christmas season to a mere “Winter Sparkle Festival”, going so far as to downplay traditional decorations in favor of stars and sparkles.

In Australia, a number of daycare centers won’t let jolly Ole St. Nick darken their classroom doorways for fear of offending immigrants and minorities. Instead schools will emphasize culturally inclusive figures such as Fairies and Elves.

Most adherents of these minority persuasions are not native to the Land Down Under. They should have known what they were getting into before they migrated there. Westerners are always being lectured as to our need to honor other cultures. Isn’t it about time those from the backwards nations of the earth reciprocate with due homage and deference?

A “spokeswoman” for the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne told the Sunday Mail there, “As a university, we have to be sensitive to the views of minority groups.” But won’t the majestic and ethereal Elves portrayed in The Lord of the Rings feel unjustly stereotyped if pre-school students see the primary function of these beings as wrapping presents and baking cookies? And what about the Hobbits; won’t they feel their culture diminished by all the attention focused on the Elves? The last thing you want to face, my friend, is a gaggle of disgruntled Hobbits.

We can all sit back and laugh at this --- unless of course mirth has become yet another celebratory quality banished by the ranks of the politically correct --- but these conflicts have ramifications beyond entertaining us on cold December evenings. These secularists hope to engineer every religious reference from society’s vocabulary in the hopes of enshrining their own dogmatic absolutist tolerance as the established creed.

At Patuxent Elementary in Lusby, Maryland, my cousin’s son was sent to the principal’s office for uttering “God bless you” after a classmate sneezed. School officials informed my irate cousin, who was called up to the school in the same manner as if her offspring had cussed out his teacher, that her son must desist in offering this traditional benediction since it offended atheists and Jews in the class.

Thus, my young cousin was forbidden from vocalizing his own religious culture and ethos. Yet for the school to have known the preferences of these unbelieving students, someone must have expressed them.

So why are they allowed to speak up and Christian children ordered to remain silent? More importantly, if Christians are told to no longer enunciate idioms harkening back to the religious origins of America’s culture since doing so would be to impose them upon those who do not share them, why are those who do not have Christian convictions allowed to impose their’s upon the rest of us? What if a Christian child is offended by some atheist brat who refuses to button their lip?

Some might consider making tolerance the highest ideal the best thing they could find under their tree (or whatever other green thing makes them warm and fuzzy all over) this “holiday season”. However, as everyone that was once a child eventually realizes, not every gift is all its cracked up to be.

Frederick Meekins is a student in the distance education program of Trinity Theological Seminiary pursuing an MA in Apologetics and Philosophy. He has published commentaries on websites such as WorthyNews.Com, The Freedom of Religion Coalition of Maryland, and the Christian Portal Homepage and in newspapers such as the Prince George's Journal.

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