Merry Christmas ACLU

As a call to action, the scheme this article proposes (i.e., flooding the ACLU with Christmas cards) has several serious flaws:

* It is based on the ERRONEOUS assumption that the ACLU engaged in litigation and related tactics to pressure businesses and other entities into dropping the use of the word "Christmas" in favor of non-religious references during the holiday season. This was not the case.

* The ACLU headquarters on Broad Street in New York is quite well-staffed, and they could easily divert resources to temporary Christmas-card opening duty in the mailroom for a few weeks without "freezing their operations" in the process.
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Above all, perhaps, one might consider whether engaging in deliberate deception and attempting to sabotage an organization's operations over a chimera isn't the antithesis of what Christmas (and Christianity itself) is supposed to be about.

Last updated: 30 August 2006

Of course, there is no "Merry Christmas" lawsuit, nor is there any ACLU litigation about U.S. currency, military chaplains, etc. But the facts are not important to these groups, because their real message is this: By protecting the freedom of Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christians through preventing government entanglement with religion, the ACLU is somehow infringing on the rights of those with majority religious beliefs.

As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.