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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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THANKS TO WHATEVER Several years ago we hosted two California colleagues for Thanksgiving dinner. They had work with my division that kept them in DC over the holiday. One man related how his fifth-grade daughter had told of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving Feast in Massachusetts, as she had learned it in school. She said, ‘The Pilgrims were thankful to the Indians for helping them.’ My colleague – not a particularly religious man – was shocked at his child’s misunderstanding of this important American tradition. He told her how the Pilgrims were deeply religious people who came to America so they could practice their faith, and that they held that first Thanksgiving feast to thank God for the bountiful harvest and for His blessings in the new land. The Indians were invited to the feast, too, as a gesture of friendship. My colleague showed his daughter how our celebration of Thanksgiving Day continues that tradition to this day. It is unique among the nations of the world. I thought of that incident when I heard that state education officials in Maryland (our former home state) had issued an edict about observing Thanksgiving in the public schools. Teachers (they said) may teach students that they can be “thankful” to almost anyone or anything. This includes families, parents, teachers, politicians, civil rights leaders, Allah, Buddha, the Great Spirit, strong spirits, evil spirits, spirits of camphor, the Indians (Cleveland & others), Manny, Moe, Jack, Sacco, Vanzetti, Harpo, Groucho, or Chico. But not “God”! (Anybody but God.) These days, talk of values is pervasive. The Maryland Education pooh-bahs were saying, in effect, that Maryland’s values are: (1) God – No! (2) Anybody else – OK! (It’s not clear where they got this authority, but you have to admire their style. The Pilgrims would be proud.) My wife and I moved to Maryland after I finished college. We settled in Silver Spring – a town tucked against the northern border of Washington, DC – and raised our family over the next 33 years. Our children attended Montgomery County public schools. As the years slipped by, Maryland morphed from old-style Southern, fairly conservative, to modern-style liberal. While most of the south has gone conservative in recent years, Maryland has moved the far left-liberal bank of American politics. This was especially true for Montgomery County – located next door to the District of Columbia. Montgomery County Public Schools were always on the political and social “cutting edge”. In the mid-‘60s, before the anti-tobacco crusade cranked up, MC educators actually put “smoking rooms” in some county high schools. Kids (they reasoned) were going to smoke anyway, so let’s keep them in school instead of driving them off the campus. Those who questioned the wisdom of this policy were called fuddy-duddies and pooh-poohed to silence. Today, both God and tobacco have lost favor in Montgomery County and the rest of Maryland. Following four years on a professional assignment in New Jersey, my wife and I returned to the DC area, but not to Maryland. We had had enough of high taxes, obsessive racial politics, and an unremittingly liberal slant on everything. We now watch goings-on in the Free State from the Old Confederacy, across the Potomac River. Nothing that comes out of Maryland – including proclamation of a Godless Thanksgiving – could surprise me. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln made his famous Proclamation of Thanksgiving – acknowledging the “…gracious gifts of the Most High God…” and designating the last Thursday in November as a national day to thank God for his blessings. Maryland folks didn’t like Mr. Lincoln very much when he was around. Maybe they’re getting back at him by dissing Thanksgiving. Not to be too tough on poor old Maryland, things are not much different in the other “blue” states, or even the red ones. The “Gott – nein!” Movement has, in fact, been goose-stepping ahead smartly, nation-wide. Maryland merely preceded other states in blowing the movement’s cover. Try to think of when your kids last brought home anything from school about Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, etc. I’ll bet you can’t remember when. Halloween now gets the major treatment at school. It’s meaningless, but it’s safer for teachers – no risk that “God” might accidentally be mentioned by some incautious student and cause a lawsuit. God has been surgically removed from Thanksgiving Day. The same “lobotomy” has been performed on Christmas. In schools, in the public square, in the shopping mall – über alles – God is G-O-N-E, GONE. The celebration of Christmas has become a caricature of itself. Christmas is entirely commercial – the make-or-break season of the fiscal year for most retail businesses. The raucous, gaudy, bowdlerized, commercial hysteria that drives our economy for the last six weeks of every calendar year no longer has the remotest connection to the Nativity, the Christ Child, Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds, Wise Men, angels, etc. As a child, circa 1951, I gazed on the colored lights and heard Christmas music wafting out into the night in the center square of our city. The Nativity scene could be seen in store windows. We sang carols in school. “Merry Christmas” rang out between teachers, students, customers, clerks, tradesmen, and bus-drivers. The city was ablaze with light and good cheer. Christmas was truly in the air. Even non-believers accepted the good will of Christmas, thereby implicitly affirming the power of the Gospel that it symbolized. Today, the lights are still there. But the carols, the Nativity, and the shouts of “Merry Christmas” are gone. In their place are silly ditties about Santa Claus, reindeer, snowmen and elves. Decorations feature grinches and cartoon characters. Greetings are now the neutral “Happy Holidays”. Hanukkah – originally a minor observance – has been elevated in the Jewish calendar so Jewish kids won’t be left out of the gift-giving. And schools now give major emphasis to a new seasonal observance called Kwanza – a holiday invented in 1965 so African-Americans could have an alternative to the “white man’s Christmas”. (What a special idea.) In our schools, all this is celebrated as “diversity”. But God’s name may not be spoken. Whatever “The Holidays” are about, school children’s ears are considered too tender to hear that Christmas, a bedrock religious observance of our nation, is not really about Santa or reindeer or elves, but about Jesus Christ – Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made flesh. Our children may not learn that God’s supreme gift to the world – His own Son – is the model for all Christmas gift-giving. Foreign visitors to our schools and malls would have no idea that Christmas meant anything more religious than hoping Rudolph’s red nose would guide Santa’s reindeer on Christmas eve. The anti-God spearhead has penetrated well beyond the public schools. Recently the Department of Defense agreed to sever all ties with the Boy Scouts of America to avoid a lawsuit from the ACLU charging that DoD’s support of the Scouts amounts to government support of religion. The ACLU says scouting is a “religion” because it requires belief in God. Rather than contest the threatened suit, DoD officials agreed to drop all association with the Scouts – a mutually productive relationship that goes back decades. The ACLU thus claims another trophy from its war on our culture’s foundations. Social commentators consider it only a matter of time until Congressional and military chaplains come under similar court challenge as government support of religion. Ditto for the inscription “in God we trust” on our currency and coinage. Unless this movement can be stopped, it will sweep every last vestige of God from our public weal. Most of us will be standing on the sidelines as the victory parade passes by. Secularism will become the official state religion. Blame for these outrages can be placed nowhere except on ourselves. Yes, the ACLU is an identifiable antagonist, but we are the compliant enablers. By allowing our liberties to be chipped away, little by little, over the last 40 years, WE have become the guilty party. If we want God back in our culture, we shall have to contend for Him. No one else will do it for us. We The People will have to be the agents of change – writing our representatives, protesting court decisions, demonstrating, and exercising civil-disobedience, if necessary. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, “God Bless America” signs sprang up like kudzu all over the country. Suddenly, God was “in” again. Americans turned back to God because they were afraid. We hoped He had not forgotten us. Now, three years later, the signs are gone, God’s name can’t be spoken at school, and the Boys Scouts are being kicked from pillar to post all over the country. Part of our problem is that we have erroneously come to believe that the courts are supreme rulers in the land. This is a false doctrine. Other branches of government are not subservient to the courts. The Constitution gives the courts only a few enumerated powers. Dictating actions to other branches of government is not among them. Nor is making new law from the bench. When the Supreme Court ruled a few years ago that the Boy Scouts need not include openly gay leaders or members, many municipalities refused to accept this ruling. Subsequently they treated the Scouts as though the ruling had not been made. They have suffered no consequences for doing this, but they did expose a previously well-kept secret: namely, that the Supreme Court has no enforcement power beyond the will of the people. There are no Supreme Court cops. We need to take a lesson from this. Only a new level of disobedience can bring things back into balance. Specifically, legislatures and executives must ignore rulings in which courts demand certain actions of them. Such a non-response by the Massachusetts legislature to the gay marriage ruling, last year, would have prevented the current national crisis. The legislature did not have to act on the orders of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Separation of powers did not require it. The Department of Defense also had no reason to answer the ACLU’s threatened lawsuit over the Boy Scouts. In practical terms, DoD could have simply ignored it. Any court ruling ordering an end to DoD’s association with the scouts would have lacked force, for DoD is in the Executive Branch. Apart from a breach of criminal law, courts lack power over the Executive Branch and its agencies. To see the truth of this, imagine a court declaring the war in Iraq illegal and ordering all hostile activity to stop. Mr. Bush could not possibly treat such an order as legitimate. To do so would open the door to endless judicial tinkering with the Executive Branch. The courts also cannot declare what is and is not a “religion” – unless we let them. This is outside the courts’ purview, but the buck stops with us. We can right things, but we have to want to do it. The situation with the courts and the banishment of God from our culture reminds me of Dorothy trying to return to Kansas. All along, the power to get there was in the Ruby Slippers. She just needed to know she could use it. Just so, we have the power to rein in the courts. We merely need to use it. In our Republic the People, not the courts, are supreme. Let’s start acting that way.
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