Really?

Some well meaning soul with impaired critical thinking skills posted this on social media as if they were heroic for doing what most of us do without thinking about it - saying Merry Christmas. 

       I have never been accosted, harassed, or in any other way been chastised or prevented from making appropriate holiday wishes to friends or acquaintances. I seriously doubt that roughly 99.9 percent of all readers have either. This meme is typical of those who, while totally unaffected by some situation, choose to get verklempt over it, anyway.

        I believe this is one of the principal things driving current social  angst. Some individuals on both sides of the  political "aisle" living across the continent from a situation or event and  knowing few, if any, of the real facts related to it, choose to become enraged rather than informed. Of course it is a given that anyone is free to say "Merry Christmas". It is also a given that doing so deliberately in a mosque or synagogue is in, at a minimum, bad taste. I wonder how these whiny bitchy complainants would react to an Orthodox Jew insisting that he should be allowed to stand up in a Church and repeat Happy Hanukkah, because it is "his right."  It's my right to fart, too, but not in your face. 

         I have never  even heard of any person, group or institution declaring that the observance of customs by and among followers of those customs in and among themselves is inappropriate. I would except those who feel forced marriage with twelve year olds is OK. Of course those groups in America are followers of Jesus! 

       It is, of course a bit more sketchy to insist that one group's customs are of such divine direction that you must be forced to observe them or to participate in a public observance of them. This is analogous to the practice when I was in school, in the dark ages, of insisting all children say the Lord's prayer in public schools, regardless of their religious beliefs. Many are still just fine with that. Mercifully for the rest of us, in Engel v Vitale (1962) the USSC was not. 

       The idea that the cultural whims and vagaries of the majority (itself an increasingly nebulous categorization) may, and should be, forcefully thrust at all of us is a sacrosanct concept of such zealots as Vice President Pence, Franklin Graham and others who, not content with having the unconditional freedom to worship, and do it tax exempt, would have us all be subjected to their babbling and superstitious rituals.

          Today these are the same folks decrying a totally imaginary and non-existent '"war on Christmas," led by frauds such as Bill O'Reilly and other talking heads of the Religious Right, which is neither.