Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Redefining Christianity for Christmas

Danny Carlton blogged From the Washington State King County Journal...

Medina Elementary School officials took down a Christmas-themed "giving tree'' Monday after a parent complained about its religious connotations. Chris Metzger, office manager at Medina, said the spiral, lighted Christmas tree with a star on top was up for about a week before it was removed. The tree had mittens on it with a different gift idea attached to each. The idea was for students to take a mitten, get the gift listed, wrap it up and return it to school along with the mitten. Organized by students in the Community Kids program, presents from the giving tree are going to be given to students at Lake Hills Elementary School, Metzger said. After the tree was taken down, the mittens were taped to a counter in the main office so the gift-giving could continue. "Now we just have a giving counter,'' joked Metzger
Since the Christmas tree isn't Christian, the only religious act was removing it because of the religious views of the idiot who thought it was.
Technically the star at the top of the tree represents the Star of Bethlehem, but you are right, the tree itself is not a Christian symbol. But even if was, since it was organized by the students, and not by the school, it should still be permissable.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just found the trackback for this post tucked away with a pile of junk trackbacks. I upgraded to MT 3.2 which is incompatible with MT_blacklist, as well as not anywhere near as good as MT_blacklist. So some good trackbacks and posts get tossed in the junk pile with the junk.

Oh, and the point I was trying to emphasize with my post was that the decision to remove the tree was based on the religious beliefs of an individual, therefore it becomes a decision of whose beliefs rule. Apparently the intolerant ones do in cases like this.

Don Singleton said...

Actually for most schools the rule seems to be that Christians lose

If a Christian had complained that another faith was being catered to, he would have been told it was a cultural thing, like singing Hannukah songs, or taking Muslim names and learning the Five Pillars of Islam.