The Baby Jesus Made Me a Paranoid Bully

The so-called "war on Christmas," we know, is a fiction promoted by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Fox News. But the need some people exhibit for FEELING persecuted is actually pretty instructive.

Witness this letter to the editor in today's Watauga Democrat (scroll down to "No Apology for Christmas"). The author labors mightily to find an enemy to stand up to. "This year there has been a great deal of controversy," she writes, unconsciously revealing the success of a head-job that's been done on her poor noggin (with absolutely no visible scars). The "controversy" she's heard about and wants to think she's actually experienced? That some unnamed but very threatening band of liberal Christ-haters don't want her to celebrate the Christ in Christmas. Evidently, they've been threatening her.

"Should Merry Christmas be said or not?"

Without bothering to notice that she lives in a county where 92 percent of residents claim a belief in Christ and fully 72 percent of residents attend church at least occasionally, nor bothering to notice that even her sainted current president said "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" on his own official White House Christmas card, she screws up her moral outrage and her Christian-among-hungry-lions courage to declare, "As for me and my family, we have and will continue to celebrate Christmas." Wow. That's flinging down the gauntlet indeed. "Take that, you liberal socialists who surround me and my family and make it dangerous for us to celebrate Christmas!"

If that were all, it would be ... just plain sad, that such gullible ignorance could be turned into such politically motivated paranoia.

This same letter-writer goes on to claim she doesn't condemn the Christmas haters but then admits they are something of a "hindrance" to "the cause of Christ," which in a miracle of perfectly circular reasoning turns out to be their own salvation. They're hindering their own salvation by not believing in Christ, and just incidentally they're also bugging the bejesus (so to speak) out of this letter-writer for not allowing her to celebrate Christmas as proudly as she might otherwise do.

That's a frustrated Christian, who's not gonna rest until she proves she's being persecuted. Not that she condemns anybody. No, she intends to stand proudly in the synagogue and pray loudly, like any practicing pharisee.

The basic bullying behind such expressions of "Christian love" might have taken as its model this editorial by Nathan Tabor. You'll remember Tabor as one of the "six dwarfs" that ran against Virginia Foxx in last year's Republican primary for the 5th Dist. congressional seat.

Tabor begins his editorial in much the same way that the letter-writer in the Watauga Democrat began: why is there controversy over saying "Merry Christmas"? Then he writes: "Christmas is not just any old holiday. Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ, and the teachings of good will and kindness towards one another that Christ brought to this world. We celebrate his birth not only to honor Him, but to remind ourselves of how we strive to live our lives of faith."

So far so good, and you'll get no argument from me on that. But note those "teachings of good will and kindness towards one another" that Tabor genuflects before, because quick as Christmas, he'll forget humility and forbearance in favor of a pugnacious political arrogance. He argues that the Christian majority ought to be a good deal bolder in exercising its majority status against the minority: "Why is the majority being asked to hide their faith for the so called 'comfort' of a minority? Our country is based on majority rule. While it would be unreasonable to force all to be [sic] the religion of the majority, it is equally unreasonable to ask the majority to deny their faith because a select few are uncomfortable. Yet, this is exactly what is happening."

Breathtaking, isn't it, the little imps of illogic that leap together out of this figgy pudding?

Presumption # 1: A "minority" is asking the Christian majority "to deny their faith." There follows a litany of supposed prohibitions in 2005 of good Christian men to rejoice ... without, we can't help noticing, a scintilla of credible evidence of such outrageous persecution.

Presumption # 2: The Christian majority has an OBLIGATION, according to the American principal of "majority rule," of FORCING that mythical prosecutorial minority to shut up. Interesting what happens to that "good will toward men" boilerplate when you're busy manufacturing a devil class of Christ-haters to pretend you're afraid of.

Tabor is an object lesson in what the mullahs of the Christian Right REALLY want. They want obeisance (because they're in the majority), and they're mad as hell that they're not in total charge of this culture.