By Brian Carnell

Thursday, December 16, 1999

I really need to stop reading the Accuracy In Academia site because it isreally starting to annoy me. Take Dan Flynn's latest article claiming that the forces of political correctness are conspiring to destroy Christmas celebrations on America's college campuses.

Flynn finds some fascinating anecdotes to back up his position. Dartmouth, for example, ended up with egg on its face after an administrator forbade a student group from sending Christmas presents to other students arguing that other students might be offended. A public outcry forced Dartmouth to make a prompt about-face. Flynn also notes that a Penn State bureaucrat with nothing better to do ordered the removal of a Christmas tree from a building, but then approved the display of an offensive picture of the Virgin Mary.

Certainly it should come as no surprise that there are elitist snobs at American universities who think Christianity is a second-class religion and maintain a pathetically hypocritical double standard about never offending religious sensibilities except when the sensibilities being offended are Christian. But despite that, clearly Flynn exaggerates the extent of the problem.

Something else that angers Flynn, for example, is that most major universities no longer have a "Christmas break" but instead a "Winter break." Does Flynn seriously expect us to think that this is indicative of an intolerance toward Christianity? At the university I work at there are numerous people of different religious backgrounds and as a result the Christmas cards we send out read "Happy Holidays." Maybe Flynn thinks this is part of a Left wing conspiracy to liberate Christmas, but it just seemed like a rather innocuous courtesy (of course I have to admit I am a member of that small group of people who is both right wing and an atheist -- although I thoroughly enjoy Christmas).

The irony in Flynn's statement, of course, is that the Christmas tree isn't really even Christian -- it was part of pagan rituals that the Church decided to absorb and incorporate into its beliefs. If anybody should be upset at somebody getting rid of a Christmas tree it should be the pagans among us.

Source:

Christmas ‘Scrooged’ on Campus. Dan Flynn, Accuracy in Academia, December 1999.

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