Luzerne County has brought back the Nativity scene and menorah that had graced its courthouse lawn for decades before being removed Dec. 16 after the threat of a lawsuit by the ACLU.
Motorist honked their horns in support.
Luzerne County did, however, add secular decorations including a Santa, Mrs. Claus, some reindeer and candy canes, and a sign saying “Happy Holidays” and “Happy Kwanzaa.”
So mostly kudos to Luzerne County but our leaders are eventually going to have to glean the fact that symbols, regardless of theology, can represent evil as well as good.
The menorah, which represents Hanukkah, stands for good things — faith, freedom and the willingness to stand up to tyranny. No American should object to those things.
The manger represents God’s love and the birth of someone who told us to love our neighbor and do unto others as you’d have them do unto to you. No one sane or decent person should have a problem with that — which of course make you wonder about the leadership of the ACLU.
Santa and candy canes represent sweet memories.
Kwanzaa is something designed to be divisive and exclusionary by a hate-monger and thug named Ron Karenga, who served time for imprisoning and torturing women. He cooked it up in 1966 specifically to replace Christmas — which he considered to be a “white” religion — in the black community.
If we want to a achieve Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a united, color-blind society things like Kwanzaa must have no respect and men like Karenga must have no legacy.
AMEN to that…… Merry Christmas to all.
The ignorance expressed in this article actually serves as a great example of exactly why the ACLU opposes religious displays on government property. As soon as religious displays are allowed, the fighting begins over which ones to include. And individuals such as Bill Lawrence start acting as the god who will decide.
And inevitably, when ever people do that, their racial and cultural biases enter into it. He states that Kwanzaa is “divisive”, then doesn’t give a single example of that. Perhaps the concepts of “Ujima:collective work and responsiblity” or “Ujamaa:cooperative economics” are offensive to him? But not the Jewish Bible’s repeated declaration that the Jews are “the chosen people of God?”
Then he talks about the offenses of Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa, but says nothing about the creator of Christmas; it’s implied that Jesus created it, but Jesus never told anyone to celebrate his birthday and the Bible doesn’t even mention his date of birth. The holiday was actually created in 354 AD by the Catholic church, which then became the official religion of the Roman Empire and began torturing and killing people en masse. All of which reinforces the need to keep government and religion separate, as called for in the First Amendment and emphasized by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the “wall of separation” in 1802. Aamazing that more than 200 years later, so many people still don’t get it.
The ignorance expressed in the above comment serves as a great example as to why the ACLU and it’s defenders are roundly reviled.
Want an example as to why Kwanzaa is divisive? As per Wikipedia — “During the early years of Kwanzaa, Karenga said that it was meant to be an alternative to Christmas, that Jesus was psychotic, and that Christianity was a white religion that Black people should shun.”
But, hey, if you want to pretend Kwanzaa is not meant to be divisive I guess some people just don’t get it.
Especially, Catholic-hating bigots.
If my factual statement about transgressions committed by the Catholic Church makes me a “Catholic-hating bigot,” then don’t your comments about the African-American holiday of Kwanzaa make you a racist? How truly hypocritical it is of you to expect everyone to accept your criticisms of Kwanzaa in a dispassionate, logical manner, but then to start name-calling if someone makes a factual criticism of a religious holiday you like.
If you’re going to talk about the symbols of other holidays, then be consistent and talk about the symbol of Kwanzaa, which is the Kinara, a candleholder with 7 candles, which is no more offensive than a menorah or manger. But if you’re going to talk about the creator of one holiday, then be honest about the others. Instead, you have totally different guidelines when discussing the African-American holiday, and resort to name-calling when questioned about it, instead of responding the the points I made.
OK, I say, basically, that Kwanzaa should not be celebrated because it was an event created to be destructive and divisive by a sociopathic thug.
You respond saying, basically, “neener, neener, so is the Catholic Church”
You cite as evidence for your claim that Christmas was started by the Catholic Church in 354 and the Church went on to become the official religion of the Roman Empire and began “torturing and killing people en masse.”
The Catholic Church was not the state religion of the Empire in 354 and did not become so until 380 so the church really couldn’t be “torturing and killing people en masse” as the official religion when Christmas was founded, right?
In fact, the Edict of Milan, under which the Empire was operating was one of religious tolerance, and the policies passed by the first Christian emperor were drastic changes to the old Roman policies of torturing and killing people en masse.
After Christianity became the state religion, there really wasn’t much time for it to start killing and torturing since Rome didn’t last that much longer. It was sacked in 410 and fell in 476. Ironically, the knock against Christianity with regard to Rome has traditionally been that it made the population passive and undermined Rome’s historic militarism, not that it killed and tortured.
Anyway, over the next 500 years or so — what we call the Dark Ages — the Western (Roman Catholic) church was absolutely heroic in its maintenance of learning and literature, defending the rights of the weak, and alleviating barbarian violence.
It was not until the relative wealth and stability of the Middle Ages and the not-so-stability of the Reformation, that your charge that the Church adopted unchristian policies starts finding some basis — and even then they are not exactly what the best-known allegations would have them be.
And even then, they still would have occurred 700 years after the start of the festival of Christmas.
And Kawanzaa is best forgotten.