There’s nothing like a good fabricated controversy for political advantage to get people talking, and sometimes they say things they really shouldn’t have.

The Times-Mirror article posted below by Dave is growing a nice comment thread. I want to call attention to a comment made by Tom Seeman, former Precinct Ops chair for the Loudoun County Republican Committee. He was so pleased with himself for crowing about how Democrats are going to take a bath over this issue that he forgot to not say this:

Whether you like it or not the majority of citizens are religious.  Most conservatives and liberals who are Christians are ok with religious displays.

Here’s what he just did. He admitted that he is A-OK with “most” citizens, or even Christian citizens, getting to decide what should be displayed on the courthouse lawn and enforcing their will via the ballot box. If this “majority” can force government to open the courthouse to ALL displays, it can just as easily demand of government that only certain displays are allowed. That is what we are talking about here; the constitutional principle that some rights belong to everyone and are not subject to popular vote, period – and Tom is ready to flush it if it gets his party some votes. Once started down that road, his comment could just as easily be this:

Whether you like it or not the majority of citizens are religious.  Most conservatives and liberals who are Christians are offended by that display.

These discussions also open a window into just what happens when a cultural majority is allowed to define “appropriate” expression. It’s illustrated in numerous comments on this and previous threads that make no distinction between messages designed to mock the demand for religious displays, and minority religious displays themselves.  For example, this commenter predicts a bizarre, embarrassing circus “[w]hen the Christian nativity is surrounded by Wiccans, Pagans, Druids, Jim Jones/David Koresh wannabes, Star Wars, etc…” In fact, there are practitioners of Wicca and other earth-based faith traditions in Loudoun, and the thoughtless presumption that a Wiccan or Pagan display would by definition be the equivalent of mocking Christianity strikes me as pretty insulting. Obviously ideas about what falls within the boundaries of legitimate expression are wildly different, including even some current loud voices claiming that Islam isn’t a real religion and should be exempt from First Amendment protections.

Given the ease with which people dismiss the beliefs of others as a joke or an abomination, who am I or anyone else to decide that there is nothing of spiritual value in Pastafarianism or the Star Wars narrative? Everybody naturally thinks that their own “common sense” is a good enough guide for this job, and that anyone who experiences it differently is just wrong. In other words, there is a reason that religious liberty for everyone is explicitly included in our Bill of Rights.

Adding to the irony here is the fact that those insisting on the right to their own choice of religious display based on “tradition” would, under different circumstances, insist that every opposing ideological or evidence-based position (environmentalism, feminism, secular humanism, the made-up term “Darwinism”) should be treated the same as a religion; they want this so that their own religious beliefs will be on an equal footing in education with science.

If truthiness like Tom Seeman’s continues to float to the surface, this should at least be entertaining. I think – although it’s hard to know for sure these days – that the Twas The Night Before Christmas poem is a parody; but a parody of which side?