We Would Like To Pre-Board Those Passengers Who Have Checked Their Reason With Their Luggage

Here’s that thing on the Christmas trees at the Seattle-Tacoma International airport. Apparently a rabbi with the Chabad Lubavitch organization has threatened to sue the airport if they do not put up an 8-foot tall menorah in order to “balance the message” of the Christmas trees - this according to an article posted on MSNBC, culled from KXAN-TV in Austin, Texas. NewsCloud has an article credited to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter that goes into a bit more detail. And now it appears, courtesty of the Post-Intelligencer itself, that the trees are going back up - and might already be back up.

According to the Post-Intelligencer story, Chabad Lubavitch started discussions with the airport about putting up a menorah back in October, then hauled out the threat of a lawsuit about a week ago.

That’s a bit of a problem - have the authorities at the Port of Seattle been stonewalling all this time, trying to keep Chabad Lubavitch off their backs, maybe until Christmas had passed and everyone had forgotten about it? And if Chabad Lubavitch was really going to sue over it, why wait until now?

The airport’s argument would come back to the ubiquity of Christmas trees and other Christmas decorations all over the country at this time of year, and while it is true that Christmas decorations have become obnoxiously ubiquitous, the argument does not hold for displaying one set of decorations exclusively. The commissioners of the Port of Seattle are elected officials who serve four-year terms and set policy at the airport.

Technically, then, putting up Christmas trees - and especially denying requests by other religious groups to put up decorations representing faiths other than Christianity - constitutes an endorsement of religion, which is, again technically, a violation of the First Amendment.

Their argument for taking down the trees in the first place was that, if they left the trees up and also erected the menorah, they would then have to take the time to find out what other religious decorations they would have to put up in order not to be stepping on anyone else’s toes this holiday season - never mind the even more technical fact that such a comprehensive display of religious decorations might, in its totality, constitute an endorsement of religion, generally, which would also violate the First Amendment.

So...at bottom what we have is a culture clash - between what Christians think of as the true meaning of Christmas, and what secular America thinks of as the festive, commercial, end-of-the-year meaning of Christmas. Christmas has become so secular in America that most of us spend most of the time thinking of Christmas as a time of year, not a celebration of someone’s birth.

The problem is that no amount of commercial spin can completely extricate the secular notion of Christmas from the religious notion of Christmas; Christmas is Christmas because the Christians made it that way. We cannot assume that people of religions other than Christianity are just going to sit back and accept the continued emphasis on Christmas at the expense of celebrating the holidays of those other religions - nor should we.

The Port of Seattle was correct to remove the Christmas trees in the face of objections against them - and though this rabbi person claims not to have been protesting the trees specifically, he seems to be somewhat full of shit, to me. The trees were the scapegoat in this case - the unwitting victims of this man’s, and his organization’s, objection to the preeminence of Christmas at this time of year, and the lack of attention paid to other religions at the same time of year. He was protesting the fact of the trees being there because they were the ONLY decorations in place - and he believes that if a Christmas tree should have pride of place in an airport, then so should an 8-foot high menorah.

That the trees are going back up, of course, has nothing to do with any kind of religion - apart from the religion of wanting to keep your job come next election day. I suspect that it will be difficult for most Americans to look at this kind of thing as anything but an attack on Christmas. Then again, most Americans are fucking idiots. It’s not an attack on anything. It’s a Jewish fellow and his organization asking for equal representation. Did they need to threaten a lawsuit? Maybe they did, if they were ignored when they asked nicely. Maybe not - maybe they were just being belligerent. Or maybe it’s just more evidence of how fucking ridiculous religion is.