Dear Catholic League: Please Stop Helping<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here's CL's latest Holiday Offering\/a> Because putting a wordy, confusing, hostile, defensive, and passive-aggressive billboard up to baffle\u00a0and assault\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/12\/dear-catholic-league-please-stop-helping.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dear Catholic League: Please Stop Helping\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here's CL's latest Holiday Offering\/a> Because putting a wordy, confusing, hostile, defensive, and passive-aggressive billboard up to baffle\u00a0and assault\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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{"id":56079,"date":"2014-12-03T10:35:32","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T17:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=56079"},"modified":"2014-12-27T17:15:43","modified_gmt":"2014-12-28T00:15:43","slug":"dear-catholic-league-please-stop-helping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/12\/dear-catholic-league-please-stop-helping.html","title":{"rendered":"Dear Catholic League: Please Stop Helping"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Here\u2019s CL\u2019s latest Holiday Offering\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

Because putting a wordy, confusing, hostile, defensive, and passive-aggressive billboard up to baffle\u00a0and assault innocent motorists is what Christmas is all about.<\/p>\n

Had a conversation recently on FB with somebody who announced \u201cI love saying \u2018Merry Christmas\u2019 because it makes liberals squirm\u201d and who followed this up with the strange remark that saying \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d is like giving rat poison to liberals.<\/p>\n

Cuz that\u2019s not at all pathological or anything.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing: when you turn a blessing like \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d into a culture war weapon against Teh Damn Libruls, the problem is with you, not the people you seek to make \u201csquirm\u201d. \u00a0Hoping that somebody will hate Christmas so you can make them squirm is an excellent way to make yourself hateful. \u00a0Comparing Christmas to rat poison is serious Mission Creep.<\/p>\n

And, of course, the irony is that these mythical squirming liberals are mythical. \u00a0I live in ultra-violet blue Seattle and regularly wish people \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d all the time during the season. \u00a0Nobody takes offense or squirms. \u00a0They just say thank you, offer some similar sentiment, and smile and everybody goes on their Merry Christmas way. \u00a0The *only* people I ever run into who talk about how allegedly offensive \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d is are Culture Warrior Right Wing Christians who dream of making somebody squirm by saying it. \u00a0I have never in my life been told by any Lefty that \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d offended them. \u00a0I have often been wished \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d by Lefties (and by non-Christians of various stripes).<\/p>\n

Christians who run around looking for reasons to be offended when some harried department store clerk says \u201cHappy Holidays!\u201d or \u201cSeason\u2019s Greeting\u201d (since they don\u2019t know if the customer is Christian, Jewish, Muslim or None of the Above) have a total net impact of affecting harried clerks and normal people as 1) butthurt human toothaches and\/or 2) belligerent bullies looking for a fight. That is not what Christmas is about, Charlie Brown.<\/p>\n

And, of course, the grand irony is that the real driver in the neutral \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d approach to Christmas is not Squirming Secular Humanist Liberals. \u00a0It\u2019s good old-fashioned beloved-by-conservative-Christians Capitalism. \u00a0Corporations and businesses who don\u2019t want to offend customers are the ones who opt for the cheery neutrality. \u00a0Ordinary people, however, still tend to take any greeting cheerily. \u00a0If a clerk says \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d the sane response is \u201cThanks! \u00a0Merry Christmas to you too!\u201d \u00a0If a Jewish friend says \u201cHappy Hannukah!\u201d the sane response is \u201cThanks! \u00a0You too!\u201d not, \u201cMerry *Christ*mas, Jew!\u201d<\/p>\n

I would tell you how to apply this to people who wish you a happy winter solstice or Saturnalia, or some other outre holiday, but here\u2019s the thing: those bogeymen live almost entirely in the imagination of the Culture War militant who spends his time dreaming of making liberals crawl and squirm for Christmas. \u00a0It\u2019s not a real issue. \u00a0It\u2019s a ginned up Culture War issue invented by people who think that Christmas is a tool in the culture war and not the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ. \u00a0I\u2019ve never in my life \u00a0run into somebody who wished me a \u201cHappy Solstice\u201d as anything other than a gag. \u00a0Don\u2019t get manipulated into reducing Christmas to something as petty as an opportunity to make some tribal enemy squirm. \u00a0Be counter-cultural and joyous. \u00a0It\u2019s not every day that the God of the universe places himself in our midst, not as a conquering tribal warrior, but as a helpless baby.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"