From the Archives: Charlottesville lawyers compile rules against ‘politically correct’ Xmas

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on December 21, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Charlottesville lawyers compile rules against ‘politically correct’ Xmas

Presidential candidate Rick Perry recently raised some hackles – and generated dozens of parodies – when he stated on a campaign video that “You don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

Perry was reflecting a meme that emerges year after year, seemingly with greater urgency in the past decade or so, that social or political forces are being applied to suppress the celebration of Christmas – not just in schools but in the wider public square, as well.



Christmas was illegal

It does not take much of a history lesson to find out that suppression of Christmas celebrations was much more common – and much more painful – in the early days of the United States than at any time in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

As University of Virginia historian Peter Onuf put it on the public radio program, BackStory with the American History Guys, “the Puritans' approach to Christmas was not low key -- it was no key. In fact, they actually banned it, made it illegal.”

Along the same lines, “New England’s War on Christmas” was the title of the first chapter of historian Stephen Nissebaum’s 1997 book, The Battle for Christmas.

Expanding on Onuf's point, Nissebaum informatively and dispassionately upends some widely-held misconceptions about the pedigree of the “traditional” Christmas:

“In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants. It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings). Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did Christmas gain legal recognition as an official public holiday…”

‘Twelve rules of Christmas’

Still, bureaucrats being bureaucrats, there are times that it may appear that the government is trying to obstruct, if not ban outright, the celebration of Christmas and other winter holidays.

Coming to the rescue of people who find themselves in an uncomfortable situation vis-à-vis school superintendents, parks administrators, or local elected officials is the Charlottesville-based public interest law firm, the Rutherford Institute.

This month, the institute’s lawyers compiled a list of the “twelve rules of Christmas,” saying that “unfortunately, Christmas has become a time of controversy over what can or cannot be done in terms of celebrating the holiday.” The rules aim “to clear up much of the misunderstanding” that has arisen in recent years.

Here are four examples from the list:

“Public school students’ written or spoken personal expressions concerning the religious significance of Christmas (e.g., T-shirts with the slogan, ‘Jesus Is the Reason for the Season’) may not be censored by school officials absent evidence that the speech would cause a substantial disruption.”

“Public schools may not require students to sing Christmas songs whose messages conflict with the students’ own religious or nonreligious beliefs.”

“Private citizens or groups may display crèches or other Christmas symbols in public parks subject to the same reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions that would apply to other similar displays.”

“Government recognition of Christmas as a public holiday and granting government employees a paid holiday for Christmas does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

In a news release explaining the twelve rules, Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead explained:

“Political correctness should never trump the Constitution. Schools, government officials and businesses have an opportunity to take the high road and not be relegated to playing the Grinch this Christmas. It’s time for some common sense.”

It goes without saying that expressing greetings such as “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” is perfectly acceptable both legally and socially. Few people need twelve – or any – rules to know that.

America Asks: When Does Daylight Saving Time Begin?

In the spirit of my February 2014 post, "America asks: What time is the Super Bowl?," today I help Americans who inquire about the start of Daylight Saving Time.

The answer, according to iDigital Times:

The spring Daylight Saving Time change in the United States begins on the 2nd Sunday in March. This year, that date is Sunday, March 8, 2015 at 2 am. Therefore, Americans in most of the 50 states should prepare spring forward, setting their clocks forward one hour at 2 am on Sunday, March 8, 2015

For the answer to a different form of the question -- when did Daylight Saving Time begin? -- let's turn to Backstory with the History Guys (Ed Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf). In an episode of the radio program rerun this weekend to coincide with the onset of Daylight Saving Time, they discuss the origins of the concept, by Ben Franklin in Paris:

BRIAN: That’s exactly right. I mean where did daylight savings time come from in the first place? I mean I don’t think it was around back in my time, where we were in perfect synchronicity with the world around us. So why did you guys invent this?

ED: Well, I think we’ve got to throw that to Peter because we know who came up with the idea for daylight savings time.

PETER: Well, it was that visionary Ben Franklin. He was all over daylight savings time.

In 1784, in the Journal of Paris, he was writing about well, the way they kept their time in Paris. And what they did is to sleep all morning because they were up all night. And Franklin did one of these calculations, a characteristic Enlightenment thing. And he’d count the number of candles that had to burn to sustain this misuse of daylight. And it would be an immense savings to the French people.

And they were going into debt at this period, badly into debt. And it led to the French Revolution. So no French Revolution, if they had had daylight savings time.

ED: And they might not have sold Louisiana to us if they wouldn’t had to pay for those candles.

PETER: Absolutely.

... and the origin of the practice, in the early 20th century:

ED: Franklin was the first to admit that he didn’t have the means to implement daylight savings time. So Karin, let’s put it Ed out of his misery. Daylight savings time in the United States started in 1918.

And there’s one thing that consistently in the 20th century got the whole country to go on daylight savings time and that was war. It was actually the Germans who first started daylight savings time in 1916.

BRIAN: So if we were going to fight, then we had to be on the same streets.

ED: Exactly.

PETER: Because you show at a battle and they wouldn’t be there.

ED: Well quite literally, the British did go on daylight savings time, a month later or very shortly after. The real point, Karin, is that Germany, Britain, the United States, go on daylight savings time because we can save energy. It was all about well, where are we spending most of our money on energy? And a lot of it was being spent on lighting when daylight savings time was first introduced and even during World War II.

Then we have this thing called air conditioning that comes along. So that when Richard Nixon, at the height of the energy crisis in the early 1970s, calls for extended daylight savings time, it’s not so clear that we’re really saving that much energy because people have started air conditioning their homes. They come home after work and if they’re in Dallas or Houston or Jacksonville, they turn on the air. And that uses a lot of energy.

When I was younger, Daylight Saving Time began in April and ended in October, so it was about (or a bit less than) half the year. Now it begins in March and ends in November, so Daylight Saving Time actually makes up a greater part of the year than Standard Time. By that standard, so to speak, shouldn't the period of the year now known as Daylight Saving Time be called "Standard Time" and what's now called "Standard Time" be called "Winter Time"?

We'll have an extra hour to think about it next fall.