ACLU Brings War on Christmas to Fort Collins, Comes Up Short

[Soldier4Christ]

ACLU Brings War on Christmas to Fort Collins, Comes Up Short

Much like the Christmas shopping season, the ACLU's War on Christmas begins earlier and earlier every year. This year in Fort Collins, Colorado, the city council decided to revise their policies to honor appropriately the holiday that almost ninety percent of America celebrates as Christmas. A task force was drawn up, given their task, and put to work.

Like most task forces set up by governing bodies, the result is only as good as the people you put in charge. In this case, the head of the ACLU in Fort Collins was tasked with running the committee. The result was obviously predictable.

The task force recommended no Christmas lights, no recognition of Christmas, no use of the colors red and green, no Christmas trees, and to otherwise squelch anything even remotely connected to Christmas. Instead, they suggested decorations of icicles and prominent use of the color brown. In short, they suggested returning Christmas to its millennia old pagan roots.

At the city council meeting to vote on the proposal, hundreds of people showed up to voice their concern (instead of the 10-15 people who usually show up) and the proposal was shot down 6-1. The lone dissenting voice protested saying that residents would feel left out and alienated by the city recognizing that the overwhelming majority of citizens are celebrating Christmas.

It's an interesting argument. Tolerance requires that people practice their faith in such a way that never leaves anyone out. Even if you took this argument at face value; that would effectively mean that no one could practice religion because the moment you identify with a group, you tacitly isolate those who are not part of that group. The idea that the First Amendment, designed to protect citizens from government, requires a destruction of all uniqueness is odd indeed.

However, it isn't a matter of simply suppressing religion from public life. These calls simply do not exist (even in the Fort Collins matter) when the religion in question is Judaism or Islam. The ACLU's goal, based on their track record, appears to be to prevent the public proclamation of Christianity in the name of the First Amendment. The bastardization of the Establishment Clause far beyond its intended meaning to require the government to enforce secular humanism on the people is to get the entire Bill of Rights backwards.

Horace Cooper, senior fellow with the American Civil Rights Union stated that it is inappropriate for "the government to pick and choose with faiths it will support and denigrate." The Establishment Clause, followed immediately by the Free Expression Clause, does not allow the suppression of a religion in the name of "diversity." In this case, the champions of diversity aren't really interested in what they preach; they simply want to redirect hate and intolerance to their desired targets. It's using the government to play the game of power politics. However, in this case — because of the efforts of the ACRU — the effort failed.

The ACLU generally uses intimidation to achieve victories that even the courts won't provide. By intimidating local officials with the threat of the ACLU, many simply cave and give the ACLU what they want. It is telling indeed that the Fort Collins ACLU head was in charge of this task force. In this case, it was the vigorous opposition of the local people combined with the ACRU that prevented the suppression of free speech and expression of an overwhelming majority of the community.

This intimidation has led to groups being formed to counteract the far-reaching agenda of the ACLU to build and impose a societal view outside the framework of the democratic process. Examples include the ACRU, which also has a courtwatch project to monitor Bush's judicial nominations, and other groups like the Thomas More Law Center and the American Center for Law and Justice.

One fact that should give everyone pause is that these debates about society now take place in courtrooms, argued by lawyers and decided by unelected judges. While there is a degree of balance with these groups, the wholesale removal of large social questions from the people has done much to not only undermine the notion of American self-government, but also call into question whether this country is really a republic anymore.

While this latest battle in the War on Christmas has subsided, the removal of the battle from the people to lawyers and courtrooms, and the fact that free expression of Christianity is under fire by the largest "civil rights" group in the country, should make us all think. This year, we can at least be thankful those who celebrate Christmas can still do so publicly as those who celebrate Ramadan or Hanukkah can do. Time will tell if the ACLU will succeed in telling us which religions and holidays we're allowed to recognize.

[Soldier4Christ]

The ACLU and Its Allies: Standing in Need of Prayer

I missed this one over Thanksgiving! Written by Jordan Lorence of the Alliance Defense Fund:

    The ACLU’s perennial lawsuits attacking our nation’s religious heritage are backfiring, and that’s something for which you can give thanks this year.

    An important—and, until recently, overlooked—constitutional requirement called “standing” is thwarting those attacks. Two federal appellate courts said “enough” and have recently thrown out ACLU lawsuits brought to stop prayer before the Indiana Legislature and a school board in Louisiana because the ACLU’s clients had suffered no harm—that is, they “lacked standing” to bring a lawsuit in the first place. So, rulings on “standing” are now protecting public prayer.

    The obscure doctrine of “standing” means that federal courts cannot hear a lawsuit unless the person bringing it has suffered some concrete injury by the hand of the government, and the federal courts can do something to remedy that harm. The Constitution itself in Article III imposes these standing requirements on everyone bringing a lawsuit in federal court.

    For decades, the ACLU has convinced federal courts to ignore these rules of standing when it brings its extreme lawsuits to eradicate the posting the Ten Commandments in city hall, to censor the singing of Christmas carols in the public schools, or to stop a school board meeting from opening in prayer. The ACLU locates the village atheist, and files a lawsuit on his behalf, asking the federal court to stop the practice because it allegedly violates the so-called “separation of church and state” in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

    But the village atheist has suffered no “concrete injury.” So years ago, the ACLU and its secularist allies bamboozled the courts into ignoring the general rules of standing for lawsuits in their cases and permitting lawsuits brought by “offended observers” of a religious display or prayer or by “taxpayers” who had contributed financially to the allegedly unconstitutional governmental act, no matter how little their contribution.

    The federal courts do not allow lawsuits by “offended observers” or “taxpayers” in any other area of law. Someone offended by government signs stating “Support the War In Iraq,” “Say No To Drugs,” or “Pay Taxes Here” cannot go to court for an order censoring those signs. The fact that they may have paid taxes to make those signs does not mean they have suffered a “concrete injury” that gets them into the federal courthouse.

    The ACLU and its allies have been getting away with this for decades. Representing clients that have experienced no real harm, they have succeeded in eliminating ceremonies and other practices mentioning God and our nation’s dependence on Him, some of which date back to before the founding of our Republic. But finally the courts are waking up. They are imposing the standing rules across the board and rejecting these lawsuits until the ACLU finds someone who has actually been harmed by the government’s actions.

    For example, on October 30, the federal appeals court for Indiana, the 7th Circuit, threw out a lawsuit by the local branch of the ACLU that challenged the tradition of the Indiana Legislature to open its sessions with invocations by local clergymen. The ACLU assembled “taxpayers” to challenge the practice. The 7th Circuit ruled that “they have not shown that the legislature has extracted from them tax dollars for the establishment and implementation of a program that violates the Establishment Clause.” The Supreme Court last spring also rejected taxpayer standing for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, who wanted to challenge a White House conference where nothing religious happened. The atheist group claimed that government officials would violate the Establishment Clause by merely urging faith-based groups to apply for federal grants to conduct programs to help the poor.

    In July, the federal appeals court for Louisiana, the 5th Circuit, rejected a lawsuit by the ACLU, which represented “offended observers” who challenged the practice of the Tangipahoa Parish School Board to open its meetings with prayer. The ACLU claims it forgot to mention in its legal pleadings that its clients had attended the meetings when there was prayer. Oops! It’s kind of hard to be offended by the prayers when you aren’t even present to hear them. The federal appeals court rightly dismissed the lawsuit with such a cotton candy foundation.

    New enforcement of the requirement that the ACLU bring clients to court who have standing–that is, who have actually been injured by the government’s actions–will not totally stop the extreme lawsuits. But if the ACLU has difficulty finding people actually suffering from government actions that acknowledge America’s religious heritage, then maybe that says something about the validity of its assertions about what the Establishment Clause means.