God Rest Ye Not So Merry

Mark Steyn gives us his take on a local story involving a Jewish ice skater, a high school madrigal group, and some idiots:

"A high school choir was asked to stop singing Christmas carols during an ice skating show featuring Olympic medalist Sasha Cohen out of concern the skater would be offended . . . "

I hasten to add this Sasha Cohen is not the Sacha Baron Cohen of the hit movie ''Borat.'' The Olympic S. Cohen is a young lady; the Borat S. Cohen is a man, though his singlet would not be out of place in a louche Slav entry to the ice-dancing pairs. Likewise, the skater-puts-carols-on-ice incident seems as sharply satirical of contemporary America as anything in ''Borat,'' at least in its distillation of the coerciveness of "tolerance":

"A city staff member, accompanied by a police officer, approached the Rubidoux High School Madrigals at the Riverside Outdoor Ice Skating Rink just as they launched into 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' and requested that the troupe stop singing . . . "

The cop and the staffer -- "special-events employee Michelle Baldwin" -- were not acting on a complaint from the celebrity skater. They were just taking offense on her behalf, no doubt deriving a kinky vicarious thrill at preventing a hypothetical "hate crime." The young miss is Jewish, and so they assumed that the strains of "Merry Gentlemen" wafting across the air must be an abomination to her. In fact, if you go to sashacohen.com, you'll see the headline: "Join Sasha On Her Christmas Tree Lighting Tour." That's right, she's going round the country skating at Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. Christmas tree lighting ceremonies accompanied by singers singing Christmas music that uses the C word itself -- just like Sasha does on her Web site.

Nonetheless, the Special Events Commissar and her Carol Cop swung into action and decided to act in loco Cohenis and go loco. Many of my fellow pundits find themselves fighting vainly the old ennui when it comes to the whole John Gibson "War On Christmas" shtick, but I think they're missing something: The idea of calling a cop to break up the singing of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" would strike most of the planet as insane. The Rubidoux High School Madrigals should have riposted by serenading the officer with the beloved Neal Sedaka classic, "Oh, Fool, I Am But A Carol" (I quote from memory).

We're so desperate not to offend anybody for anything these days that stories like this are happening on an ever-increasing frequency. The idiots in our world have so convoluted the meaning of Christmas that they now automatically assume that Christmas trees were annointed by the Baby Jesus himself, and the Wise Men showed up at the stable singing Old English drinking songs that had been converted into carols. As Steyn points out:

There were no bauble-dripping conifers in the stable in Bethlehem. They didn't sing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," either. That's, in effect, an ancient pop song that alludes to the birth of the Savior as a call to communal merry-making: No wonder it falls afoul of an overpoliced overlitigated "diversity" regime. Speaking of communal songs, they didn't sing "White Christmas" round the manger. A Jew wrote that. It's part of the vast Jewish contribution to America's common culture.

Steyn also takes on the issue of the "holiday" trees at SeaTac Airport that were removed after a complaint from a Jewish rabbi. Steyn gets it right:

This isn't about religion. Jesus is doing just fine in the United States. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized American Christianity unique in the Western world. What the rabbi in Seattle and the cops in Riverside are doing is colluding in an assault on something more basic: They're denying the possibility of any common culture. America is not a stamp collection with one of each. It's an overwhelmingly Christian country with freedom of religion for those who aren't. But it's quite an expansion of "freedom of religion" to argue that "those who aren't" are entitled to forbid any public expression of America's Christian inheritance except as part of an all-U-can-eat interfaith salad bar. In their initial reaction, Seattle Airport got it right: To be forced to have one of everything is, ultimately, the same as having nothing. So you might as well cut to the chase.

I'm happy to see that there has begun to be a genuine backlash against this anti-anything-related-to-Christmas attitude on the part of the public. There seems to be a move toward punishing stupid political correctness, and that's healthy for all of us.

On my little street in Orange County I know I have neighbors who are Jewish, Muslim, possibly Buddhist, and probably some who don't really believe anything. When I put up hundreds of Christmas lights to decorate my house, I didn't do it offend the non-Christian neighbors, I did it because that's how I like to celebrate the season. If they want to put up a menorah, a crescent, or a holy cow, I don't care. I refuse to be offended by something which doesn't honor my beliefs.

I seriously believe that if we all took that attitude, we'd all be a lot happier.