Soviet Christmas CardI guess I’m not quite done with this. I assume you’ve all heard about this Great Sea-Tac Christmas Tree Fiasco. What a load of crap.

I get it that some Rabbi thought it would be a good idea to put up a menorah in addition to the Christmas trees. I get it that when the trees were taken down the Rabbi made it clear that he was sorry — that this wasn’t the outcome he was looking for.

And I get but disagree with this concept of the Supreme Court determining Christmas to be sufficiently secular that putting up a Santa or a tree doesn’t cross the ol’ establishment line.

But if it’s secular, why do so many religious people take it so damn seriously? Did you see Lou Dobbs discussing the case with Jeffrey Toobin a few days ago? Lou was absolutely apoplectic! I can’t find the show transcript, but at one point he said something like, “And that… that…. that… that… Rabbi…” I don’t think “Rabbi” was the first word that came to his mind. It’s as if somebody told Lou that Rabbi Bogomilsky ran a sanctuary for Mexican illegal aliens in the basement of the shul.

Here are a few more over-reactions to the case from that Seattle Times article I linked to above:

Robert Jacobs, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said more than a dozen organizations or rabbis had reported receiving hate e-mail. His organization was advising local Jewish institutions that have received significant numbers of hate e-mails to consider having security during Hanukkah and other holiday-season events.

The furor has been building for years. Last month, the Alliance Defense Fund, a religion-based legal-aid group in Arizona, announced it had lined up an army of attorneys who were prepared to defend the tradition of Christmas in schools and on public property.

“Frankly, it’s ridiculous that Americans have to think twice about whether it’s OK to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” said Alan Sears, the group’s president.

Jesus Christ (so to speak)! Who’s being ridiculous now? And you get wankers like O’Reilly complaining that all the religion has been taken out of the holiday. If you want the religion bit, go ahead, but then you can’t turn around and say it’s secular enough that it belongs on public land.

If you want your trees and your Santa and your shiny gifties wrapped at the mall and your stockings filled with gift cards from the Home Depot and Pottery Barn and the Gap, I say fine. But the lot of you have to say that this has nothing to do with Jesus. Jesus is the messiah of the Christian faith. Christmas is about Santa.

One or the other. Not both. Nope. But think about this: if you take the religion out of Christmas, you’ll end up with something akin to what the card pictured above is about. Notice the text. Notice the flag being carried by the lil’ cosmonaut. That’s right. Christmas without religion is like something out of the Soviet Union. The communist, atheistic Soviet Union. Would that make you happy? I doubt it.

My advice is to take Christmas back. Take it away from those horrible commercial, secular, godless heathens and keep it close to your heart as the holy day you know it to be. Don’t share it with the rest of us. We don’t deserve it.

Update: I haven’t located the transcript of Dobbs’ rant on the Rebbe, but thanks to , I do have access to a column Lou wrote on the subject.

This week we were treated to the spectacle of an easily offended and highly offensive rabbi who walked into an airport, gazed upon Christmas trees all around him and suddenly was overwhelmed with an immense, and apparently irresistible, urge to sue the management of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport because nowhere among all the Christmas trees was a single menorah. Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Seattle even delivered to the airport’s management a draft of a lawsuit he would file if they didn’t sprinkle menorahs around the Christmas trees.

Political correctness in this country reached an entirely new level of absurdity some years ago. But occasionally, and the situation at Sea-Tac is just such an occasion, we exceed ourselves. The militant fundamentalist rabbi so flummoxed Sea-Tac management with his threat and their perceived obligation to be “politically correct” that, rather than think rationally or simply tell him to stuff it, they started hacking away at all those artificial Christmas trees and quickly descended into a public relations nightmare in which they managed to offend reason, cultural values and the vast majority of Americans.

Wonkette mocks Lou for referring to him as a “militant fundamentalist rabbi,” but if you’ve ever met a Lubavitcher…

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