Herman

Cain

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November 26, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, You Constitutional Quacks

Now that the 2007 end-of-year holiday season is officially underway, I want to offer some heart-felt politically insensitive expressions of happiness and well wishes. Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

It seems that each year another distortion or misinterpretation of the First Amendment generates another attack on our end-of-year season for thanks to God, celebration and hope. These attacks are intended to put the rest of us on the defensive about our faith, culture and history, and claim a victory for political correctness.

The latest? A Washington state school district issued a memo to its teachers instructing them to tone down the “happy” in Happy Thanksgiving. Why? It was not a happy occasion for everyone when the Pilgrims paused to give thanks, so let’s not offend those who were not so happy on that first Thanksgiving.

Last year’s highlight was an effort to take “Christ” out of Christmas. Some schools were instructed to take “holiday vacation” time instead of the traditional designation of “Christmas vacation”. Why? It might offend someone even though schools have been calling it Christmas vacation since our founding.

And there was a mindless debate somewhere over whether a Christmas tree and Santa Claus were religious symbols. I can’t recall where because I dismissed it from my memory as soon as I heard about it.

I refuse to allow these would-be constitutional quacks to intimidate my faith, our culture, our history and our properly interpreted rights. If they want to replace “Here comes Santa Claus” with “Here comes Holiday Guy”, go right ahead, but I do not. My family, friends and I will be singing “We wish you a merry Christmas”, not “We wish you a happy holiday”.

And how in the world do you tone down happy? That’s like being half pregnant, or just watching only the first half of every college football bowl game. They can take that to “far, far away land”.

We will already have to contend with non-stop presidential campaign messages as a result of presidential primary musical chairs by the states. The 2008 presidential election was supposed to be far, far away in election terms, but the jockeying for primary position now starts on January 3, 2008.

That’s the same day as one of the major college football bowl games. That’s un-American!

Our national consciousness needs an emotional uplift after a full year of non-stop Democratic denial and doom and gloom about everything. On November 19, 2007, fellow North Star Writers Group columnist David Karki wrote an excellent article on this subject titled “Reality: Unrecognizable to Denial-Afflicted Democrats.”

We know that an emotional lift is not going to come from Washington D.C. It has not all year. It will have to come from within each of us through our respective faiths.

And there’s the rub. There are those who do not want to respect our individual faiths, only their own by trying to suppress ours. It’s the enemy from within our nation eagerly at work.

One of the founding principles of this country is freedom of religion, not political correctness. If more people would actually read the First Amendment, then they might understand the difference. But then, maybe they already do, which is why they do the things they do to try to steal our joy.

“Joy to the world, the Lord is come.” Who are the constitutional quacks waiting on?      

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