Up on the rooftop is a constitutional violation

December 22, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

This will be my last chance to pop off on the “War on Christmas” this year, and I don’t intend to miss it.

People in Green Bay, Wis., must be either amused or disgusted by the antics of their city council. Chad Fradette, council president, erected a nativity scene on an overhang at the city hall’s entrance because he wanted to show solidarity with the residents of Peshtigo, after the Freedom From Religion Foundation warned officials there to stop displaying a creche on public property.

Of course the Supreme Court has made it clear that these types of stand-alone religious displays are unconstitutional at the seat of government, so Fradette’s actions created an open forum for other displays. Sure enough, requests came pouring in.

A Wiccan group provided its symbol, a Pentacle, surrounded by a wreath. Not long after it was put up, some moron waited until the cover of night, climbed up to the overhang and threw down the wreath. The Wiccans sent a replacement, but municipal officials refused to put it back up.

Other requests have come in from Unitarians, Hindus and Buddhists. I realize that some groups are putting in requests just to make the point that government must treat religions equally. Most Unitarians, generally speaking, are advocates of church-state separation and don’t seek to have the state display their symbols.

In an effort to sort things out, the council met Dec. 18 and promptly made things worse. They voted 6-7 to keep the creche up but exclude all other symbols — a clearly unconstitutional move. Brilliant, guys! Why not just hang a “Sue us now!” sign on the front door?

How did Green Bay get in this mess? Fradette was angry because he feared that the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is based in Wisconsin’s capital, was trying to impose “Madison values” on smaller, god-fearing communities. He told one newspaper:

“I’m trying to take this fight to the people who need to be fought. I’ll keep going on this until this group imposing Madison values crawls back into its hole and never crawls out.”

How lovely. Fradette threw a fit, and the end result was this legal quagmire. Let this be a lesson to government officials: Temper tantrums rarely spawn effective public policy.

LOL! What a hoot. Those cheeseheads sure do know how to celebrate.

  • Breaking the law is breaking the law. I think the only reasonable solution is to deport Fradette and the other council members who voted to engage in illegal activities.

  • You’re never met Serious Morons until you’ve met small town Wisconsin morons. My sister-in-law is stuck in one of thos places, teaching at a local campus of UW that’s more a low-rent JC than a real college, and she’s convinced the town has a collective minus-number IQ (she teaches introductory biology for people planning a career in medicine and gets criticized by Xtians for “promoting evolution” and gets no support from the campus leadership, since that might mean the idiots would get flunked out and the bureaucrats would get their attendance dollars). You hear about these people (somebody’s out there voting for Sensenbrenner, right?) and you get the idea someone took a wrong turn on their way to Appalachia 150 years ago or so. When I call around the country, I discover even the “good people” in those towns are a few sandwiches short of a picnic, as they say.

  • Wisconsin is an amazing place. Years ago I lived in Ashland and Bayfield counties and I thought that I was as far from the values of the deep south as I could get, but I wondered why I would see pickup trucks with a Confederate Flag in the left rear window. Once when I voiced this I learned that it was a Klan recognition sign. Needless to say I was surprised. I guess that wherever you go in this great country you can find racism, bigotry, and no respect for the Constitution and law of the land. I wish these people would realise that my butt or throat has no room for their religion and they should stop trying to jam it there.

  • Yeah, we may have elected Russ Feingold three times up here, and the great progressive Robert La Follette is still revered here by some of us, but there are indeed parts of the state that are essentially Alabama with colder weather. Green Bay is in the most conservative part of the state (along with the Milwaukee suburbs), although they elected a Democrat to Congress up there in 2006. This sort of wingnuts-for-Jesus behavior is not really a surprise, except as it seems less Wisconsin-nice than people usually are up here.

    I would second RandyR though—racism, bigotry, and no respect for the Consitution are not a Wisconsin thing as much as they’re an everywhere thing. We’ve got as many of ’em as anywhere else, particularly in our state assembly, which is a never-ending source of entertainment. We used to have some Repugs who were worthy of respect, including the first politician I ever cast a vote for, Governor Lee S. Dreyfus, but his like hasn’t been seen ’round these parts in quite a while.

  • Every year it’s the same old BS–the freakin “War on Christmas”. Isn’t this supposed to be the season of Goodwill Toward Men? Why do these so-called Christians spend the whole time being pissed off about everything instead of enjoying themselves? I guess they just need something to whine about and Christmas is the big finale to another year of feeling persecuted and victimized. Ya know, Jesus was Jewish anyway and so am I and I think there’s a war on Chanukah! No one says “Happy Chanukah,” it’s always “Happy Holidays” and that pisses me off!! * (*snark alert)

  • Every year it’s the same old BS–the freakin “War on Christmas”. Isn’t this supposed to be the season of Goodwill Toward Men? Why do these so-called Christians spend the whole time being pissed off about everything instead of enjoying themselves? I guess they just need something to whine about and Christmas is the big finale to another year of feeling persecuted and victimized. Ya know, Jesus was Jewish anyway and so am I and I think there’s a war on Chanukah! No one says “Happy Chanukah,” it’s always “Happy Holidays” and that pisses me off!! * (*snark alert)

  • Every year it’s the same old BS–the freakin “War on Christmas”. Isn’t this supposed to be the season of Goodwill Toward Men? Why do these so-called Christians spend the whole time being pissed off about everything instead of enjoying themselves? I guess they just need something to whine about and Christmas is the big finale to another year of feeling persecuted and victimized. Ya know, Jesus was Jewish anyway and so am I and I think there’s a war on Chanukah! No one says “Happy Chanukah,” it’s always “Happy Holidays” and that pisses me off!! * (*snark alert)

  • I don’t know one atheist, agnostic, Bright, Humanist, Freethinker, who wants to deny Christians the right to celebrate their holiday.
    The can put their cresch’s and their crosses on their lawns, their church property, even in their stores.
    The freedom to practice a religion or not to practice a religion is too precious to much around with.

    Don’t the Christians get it. Don’t they get that they are free, but they are not free to evangelize and proselytize on public property. Is that too much to ask? We ask that our tax dollars not be spent on faith based initiatives. Is that too much to ask? We ask that they keep their laws off our civil liberties. Is that too much to ask?

  • The war on x-mas is a Bill O’Reiley ficiton fantasy novel and the only copy is in his “arse”. Be happy it’s the only copy because the sex scenes (of course there are, it’s Bill) are wierd and creepy just like Bill is in real life.

    So, practice your religon in peace, whatever it is, with the knowledge that our Founding Fathers had the forsight and brilliance to guarantee that freedom by keeping religion and the state seperate.

    To mix the two is to corrupt both.

  • The “war on christmas” is just a sad hangover christians suffer from having stolen the holiday in the first place, from the pagan non-believers, who only wanted briefly to distract their poor frozen minds away from the brutalities of the typical northern european winter. what could be worse for these crooks than to have the thing stolen back from them, and so find themselves forced to confront once again the laughing crazies, swirling wassail and dancing naked, instead of solemnly contemplating just exactly who is begotten, and who is not.

  • People who have to make a public display of religion do so because privately they really do NOT believe.

  • Don’t Xtians themselves find this obviously disingenuous power-play distasteful in the context of a pluralistic society? Why don’t the ones who blame Muslim moderates for not speaking our against extremists/terrorists come out at times like these and tame their belligerent siblings? The irony here is that Xtian apologists often shun moral relativism/”majority makes right” morality, and yet, they are only pushing their agenda in the public square because they know they have the majority- that’s what the whole “Christian Nation” argument boils down to.

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