The Krait Reports From The Frontlines Of The (Phony) War On Christmas In The Sooner — er, Stupid — State!

The Dubster, while on the hustings in the 2000 campaign, nicknamed — as was his stupid wont — Maureen Dowd of the NY Fiswrap "The Cobra." So, if one of the two distaff Op-Ed columnists on that paper was nicknamed for a poisonous reptile, fair play gives us The Krait (aka Gail Collins). Recently, The Krait put the bite on the loons who see an "attack upon Christmas" with every utterance of "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings." For the loons, it's "Merry Christmas" or nothing. No wonder Will Rogers got the hell out of Oolagah while the gettin' was good. If this is (fair & balanced) deconstruction of stupidity, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
My Favorite War
By Gail Collins

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american atheists bauer buses celebrate christian christmas clergy column concerned controversy council cut decades don downtown fights heart holiday hour hug inhofe interview issue lights longer named nativity officials oklahoma parade people portland pub public read reform religious ride season secular senator sponsored think threats tree tulsa war world year

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Well, here’s some good news for a change. The Holiday Parade of Lights in Tulsa, OK, has been saved!

I know you’ve been worried.

The Tulsa City Council has voted to allow the parade to go forward Saturday night, despite protests against the disappearance of the word “Christmas” from its name.

It’s not entirely clear that the council actually could have stopped it, or even whether the parade ever officially had Christmas in its name. But Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is outraged.

Inhofe was away from home last December, stuck in Washington trying to kill off health care reform. Now he’s back, and he’s noted a dwindling in the parade’s religious angle. “I just don’t like what’s going on in America today, all over the country, with the aversion some people seem to have toward Christ,” he said in one of his many interviews explaining that he will no longer ride his horse in any holiday event that isn’t named for Christmas.

Go to it, Senator Inhofe! I love this controversy, and only in part because it diverts Oklahoma’s senior senator from his normal day job of trying to convince the world that global warming doesn’t exist.

We live in a time of so many terrifying, insurmountable problems. It’s comforting to return to arguing about whether the nation’s moral fiber is endangered if Tulsa downplays the religious aspects of a parade full of Santa Clauses that is currently sponsored by a popular downtown pub.

Actually, the “war on Christmas” controversy has been a little muted this year, and I’ve missed it. Even the public hearing in Tulsa looked thinly attended, as if the issue at hand was charter revision instead of the preservation of the Christian half of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

The American Family Association is still checking up on major retailers and informing us that while Bed Bath & Beyond is “for Christmas,” Foot Locker is “against.” And a coalition of concerned clergy in Fort Worth is calling residents to boycott the transit system because someone purchased ads on four buses that say “Millions of Americans Are Good Without God.”

It is my impression that people who ride buses in Texas don’t have a whole lot of other options. Really, concerned clergy, do you think they’re doing it to cut their carbon footprints?

But until Tulsa, the biggest conflict was here in the New York area, where a billboard war erupted after the American Atheists forked over $20,000 for a sign that showed a picture of a Nativity scene and the message: “You know it’s a myth. This Season, Celebrate Reason!” The Catholic League then erected one on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel that retorts: “You Know It’s Real. This Season, Celebrate Jesus.”

In this battle for the hearts and minds of commuters, the atheists seem to have been overly belligerent, although it is understandable that they get a little testy this time of year. If you complain about Christmas overkill because you are, say, a Muslim or a Jew, the general response is a quick hug and a nervous affirmation that all faiths deserve respect. But atheists do not get that many hugs, and perhaps it is beginning to tell on them.

We are still enjoying the continuing fights about What To Call The Tree. In one of the most notable screeds of the season, Gary Bauer, the former Republican presidential candidate and social conservative, appeared to be saying that officials in Portland, OR, who named the annual tree-lighting ceremony “Tree Lighting” were doing the work of the would-be Christmas tree bomber. “Radical Islam’s secular enablers have been driving Christianity from the public square for decades,” he wrote.

Bauer said in a phone interview that he was not suggesting that trying to blow up downtown Portland and secularizing the tree lighting were equivalent.

“To me, it was just a nice rhetorical way to get people to read the column,” he said.

I am in sympathy with such sentiments since I would do just about everything short of bomb threats to get people to read a column. I also have a soft spot in my heart for Bauer and I am sorry he is not planning to run for president again in 2012 because the moment he fell off the platform during a pre-primary pancake flipping contest in New Hampshire was one of my personal campaign high points.

But about Tulsa. For years the parade was sponsored by the American Electric Power-Public Service Company of Oklahoma, which is mercifully known as P.S.O. “We always referred to it as the P.S.O. Parade of Lights,” a spokesman for the utility told The Tulsa World. When P.S.O. backed out, a downtown pub named McNellie’s agreed to underwrite the Holiday Parade of Lights. You’d think people would be grateful that the new sponsor didn’t want to call it the Happy Hour Parade of Lights, or Atomic Chicken Wings Special. But no.

Keep fighting. I haven’t thought about the Bush tax cuts for hours. Ω

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times Company

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