Merry F***ing Christmas!

I don’t know what’s more disturbing. The idea that a bunch of right-wing wackos are up in arms over Duh-bya’s decision to send out a “Happy Holidays” card instead of a “Merry Christmas” one... or the fact that the Post has decided to make a front-page story out of it. (Below the fold, sure, but still on the front page of the newspaper!)

Reality-check time: If a bunch of crazy people started wandering down the street in their underwear, ranting about how little green frogs were engaged in a global conspiracy to rob them of their brain waves and overtake humanity as the dominant species on the planet, nobody would give them the time of day. If they managed to hold up traffic, maybe they’d get a mention in a little sidebar in the Style section (or on, say, a weblog or two). So why are we dignifying such notorious lunatics like William Donohoe, Joseph Farah, Tim Wildmon, and Jerry Falwell with even the implication that they’re remotely relevant?

Oh, and while I’m thinking of it, remind me to do all of my holiday shopping at Lands’ End and Target. See, these aforementioned dipshits have decided to organize boycotts against retailers who dare to promote holiday sales using more inclusive terminology. In other words, if you want their business, you have to be just as religiously bigoted as they are.

Now, is it religiously exclusive for a company to use “Merry Christmas”? No. As much as these idiots want to pretend otherwise, Christmas is just as much a secular holiday as it is a religious one, if not more so. Deal with it. Maybe you attach more importance to the religious aspect of it — knock yourself out. But hell will freeze over before you convince everyone else that it’s all about the baby Jesus. (After all, pretty much every tradition associated with the holiday — not to mention the date itself — originated outside Christian orthodoxy.)

But that’s an entirely different story from trying to force people to use particular terminology. The message these freaks are sending out is explicitly designed to exclude those who don’t celebrate their narrowly-defined, fundamentalist Christian version of “Christmas.” The whole reason they want companies to use “Merry Christmas” is because they believe it does exclude everyone who doesn’t believe exactly what they do (and especially those greedy Jews, heathen Chinee, terrorist Mussel-men, and godless atheists). Their agenda has nothing to do with preventing religious discrimination — it’s specifically designed to cause it. That’s their entire objective: “You’d better promote our religious beliefs to the exclusion of everyone else’s, and we’re not going to give you our business until you do.”

So they don’t like “Happy Holidays”? Then I’ve got a more appropriate message for them... but in the spirit of the holiday season, I’ll refrain from conveying it here.