The Left's strategy on Christmas and morality is to dilute and distort.
It’s appallingly looking NOT like Christmas
Ev’rywhere you go:
Leftists are at it once again, using their anchormen
On a campaign to spread disdain you know.
Yes, it’s that time of year again…when socialists, atheists, and malcontents (AKA — members of the ACLU and all who support the positions it advocates) get together to conspire — not necessarily by the fire, mind you — to spoil everybody’s good time. Let’s see what they’ve accomplished so far this Christmas season (yes, I said “Christmas” — sue me!):
• Federated Department Stores — you know, of Macy’s and Miracle on 34th Street fame — has informally, and, supposedly without a specified edict, instructed all of its stores to, if they desire, remove all direct references to the word, “Christmas.”
• Dayton Hudson Corporation –Target, to be more precise — evicted all of the Salvation Army workers from in front of its stores.
• The city of Denver eliminated all references to Christmas — as well as a float — from its annual Parade of Lights.
• Schools and local government buildings in various parts of the country have banned nativity scenes, and any specific Christmas references at their holiday gatherings and concerts.
• Pa rum pum pum pum.
Understandably, there have been a great number of articles on this subject, as well as a multiplicity of protestations by well-known conservative commentators that this is all an attack on religion, Christianity, God, and all things red and white. To be sure, there is a component of this, but just a tangential one. In reality, this is politics at its nadir, and much more precipitated by the recent election results than anybody’s aversion to Christmas carols or nativity scenes. In fact, Maureen Dowd makes this crystal clear in a recent New York Times column:
I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas.
So now, on top of all the stress related to having a president and vice president who scared us to death about terrorists to get re-elected, I have to be stressed about the fact that my holiday stress might cause me to turn into an old bat…
Would Ms. Dowd be this depressed and Scrooge-like if Mr. Kerry won the election? Certainly not. She’d be proclaiming this as the greatest Christmas of her lifetime, and that God really is a Democrat after all. Alas, Mr. Kerry lost, and the Left is not of Christmas cheer. Bah, humbug. However, there is more to Ms. Dowd’s article and its timing than the typical sore loser grousing that must not be overlooked, for high-profile minions like this are always part of the overall strategy being employed by those they support, and ours is to divine what it is. Fortunately, some recent polls give us invaluable insights as to what might be the nexus.
First, Newsweek determined that 38% of Americans do not believe what is written in the Bible, and 24% (59% of non-Christians) don’t buy into the Christmas story. Additionally, 26% of those polled are against teaching creation theory in public schools as an evolution alternative. Beyond this, a recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that 31% of Americans (including 47% of Democrats and 33% of Independents) believe that religion is having too much of an impact on President Bush’s policy decisions. On top of this, 21% of those polled (30% of Democrats and 19% of Independents) are concerned that religion will have an even greater impact on the President’s views in his next term. Finally, 51% (65% of Democrats and 53% of Independents) stated that they are worried politicians in general are too close to religion and religious leaders.
When one adds these recent findings to what is clearly a coordinated attack on Christmas almost immediately after Senator Kerry conceded, one must conclude that the Democrats have identified a religion gap in the society that represents an opportunity for them in 2006 and, most important, 2008. Obviously, in the weeks following November 2, most political analysts asserted that the deciding factor in this election was the moral values component that nobody had foreseen. The question moving forward is clearly how will the Democrats address this chasm in ideologies in the future. Some have suggested that they need to do a better job of presenting the case to the American people that they are truly the morality party, and that this will win back enough voters in upcoming elections. However, the problem here is that if the de facto leaders of your party are a serial adulterer and his wife who doesn’t seem to mind his improprieties, it is going to be difficult to represent real moral values to those who truly do care about such things.
So, where does this leave them? Likely, courting the portion of Democrats and Independents who voted for Mr. Bush this year that are not necessarily religious — but not totally antitheist — and could be swayed from voting Republican in the future if they are somehow estranged from conservative ideologies. Frankly, this is a target-rich environment, as almost twice as many Democrats voted for Mr. Bush than Republicans voted for Mr. Kerry. Furthermore, Bush and Kerry received roughly the same percentage of votes from Independents.
As such, for the Democrats to be successful in 2008, they will need to shift these numbers around a bit, especially in a couple of key battleground states like Ohio and Florida. To accomplish this, it appears that one of the initial strategies is to divide the religious component in the society from those who are less so. How? By making it clear to the marginally moral that the piety of others — specifically, the Republicans — is infringing on their rights. In this season’s instance, the more the Left can weed out the religious component from the holiday itself, the better off it’ll be. In a broader context, the more people who can be made to feel uncomfortable by any public reference to God or religion, the less significant this moral values issue will be to them in future elections.
Phase two of this strategy appears to be an attempt to expand or redefine what moral values are. A recent San Francisco Chronicle cover story explains this for us:
Kim Bobo has spent the last 30 years trying to get people of faith to see the connection between their Bibles and the federal budget, to see "moral value" in tax policies that would bridge the widening gulf between rich and poor.
"Those of us who work with the religious community have not adequately made the connection between economic disparity and moral values," [said Bobo, executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice].
At first glance, one mustn’t miss the significance of a major American newspaper placing such a story on its Sunday cover page just two weeks before Christmas — especially in the midst of the aforementioned holiday attacks. Recognizing this, the strategy by the Left should be emerging: dilute and distort. The dilution is in doing everything possible to remove God and all religious references from the public purview, even during high-profile national holidays that inherently celebrate religious beliefs — in effect, watering down such beliefs. The distortion is to expand the meaning of moral values beyond that which currently exists.
In Ms. Bobo’s case, to suggest that fairer tax policy — meaning a redistribution of wealth from those who have to those who don’t — is an issue of morality and not finances is an attempt to distort the nation’s concept of moral values. With this tactic — especially if the messengers are going to be religious leaders — the Left is trying to include traditionally socialistic ideologies such as wealth redistribution to solve poverty into the moral values component. In doing so, they believe that a larger percentage of swing voters will see Democrats as walking on a higher moral ground during the next two election cycles than did so in the previous one.
In the end, this is all much less a fear of God or religion than a fear of losing. And that’s why:
It’s appallingly looking NOT like Christmas
Ploys like ne’er before.
But the sorriest blight to me, is the folly that I see
From the left-wing boors.
slep@danvillebc.com
Read more articles by Noel Sheppard
