The Martyr Pose Strikes Again

Of all the prominent religious right figures, you'd think the last one to scream persecution and claim victimhood would be Pat Buchanan. But here he is in - where else? - the Worldnutdaily proclaiming himself and his fellow Christians the victims of a silent and unnamed conspiracy deep within the bowels of Macy's:

Now Macy's has stopped using the phrase "Merry Christmas" in all store advertising, replacing it with what Macy's calls the more inclusive "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays."

But how is it "inclusive" to exclude the Christians' greeting? Is that not anti-Christian? Why would the Macy's of the "Miracle on 34th Street" do such a thing? Why would Federated Department Stores, Macy's parent company, impose such a policy?

By Newton's laws of motion, an object moving in a given direction will continue to do so unless an outside force intervenes. What hidden force intervened to cause Macy's to reverse course and suddenly sever its ties to Christmas? Who insisted that Macy's cease to mention Christmas, the holiday around which its selling season is built?

It is hard to believe some Macy's executive took it upon himself to make so offensive a decision as to expunge "Merry Christmas" from the store, when so many of Macy's most loyal shoppers were certain to be disheartened and hurt. Who is trying to kill Christmas?

It needs to be said. What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity - the manifestations, the symptoms of a sickness of the soul, a disease a Vatican diplomat correctly calls "Christianophobia," the fear and loathing of all things Christian, coupled with a fanatic will to expunge from the public life of the West all reminders that ours was once a Christian civilization and America once a Christian country.

Okay Pat, climb down off that cross. Jesus was crucified, you weren't, and frankly you're much more suited to playing the bully than the martyr. Pat is not alone in screaming holy hell at Macy's decision, and though Pat is not a big fan of the free market himself, most of his fellow so-cons are. Yet they seem to be interpreting what is simply a matter of a private corporation recognizing its diverse customers as a sign of that we will soon be throwing Christians to the lions. It's all quite silly.

Macy's stores are located in large urban areas. Large urban areas tend to have a wide variety of religions and ethnicities - Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Rastafarians and who knows what else. Perhaps their executives who deal with advertising and public relations sat down and looked at the religious makeup of their customers and realized that a large portion of them are not Christian, yet they have holidays around the same time as Christmas too. Hence, they might think that a more generic greeting like "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" would be more appropriate and less exclusive and might make the store more inviting to non-Christians during November and December. Now, whether they are right or wrong about that, it's a reasonable decision by a private corporation based solely on its desire to maximize its appeal in an increasingly diverse marketplace.

Oh, but not to Pat and his brethren. What seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to rational people is, to them, evidence of widespread "fear and loathing" of them designed to "kill Christmas". It's a "hate crime" manifesting a "sickness of the soul". So tell me, Pat, in all the years past when Macy's advertising was targeted only to Christians by acknowledging only Christmas, were you railing against their fear and loathing of Jews and Hannukah or of Muslims and Ramadan? Was it a hate crime against Jews and Muslims proving the sickness of their soul? Wait, let me guess....your logic only applies to your religion? I thought so.

The way the minds of these people work is just baffling. They live in a culture with hundreds of Christian TV and radio stations (while other religions have none), thousands of Christian newspapers and magazines, tens of thousands of Christian churches (dwarfing all other faiths combined by an enormous margin), where something on the order of 99% of all of the political leaders who have ever served in any branch of government were Christian, where Christianity is so ingrained in our cultural habits that we schedule our entire year around Christian holidays - yet if one company dares to not pay their proper respects by using a more general greeting on their magazine ads, we're this close to throwing Christians into concentration camps. It's time to come down off that cross and use the wood to build a bridge to reality.