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Brou-ho-ho

Another of those holiday culture clashes you may have read about: Airport removes Christmas trees to avoid lawsuit.

A report from ABC claims the rabbi "asked" (though since it was part of a legal action, perhaps "demanded" would be more in order, "the port of Seattle, which runs the airport, to build an eight-foot menorah and hold a lighting ceremony." That's a critical difference, as it's not as if another religious group with a December holiday offered to donate something -- leaving it to the airport authorities to simply deal with the logistics of whether or not they had the space to accomodate it -- but if this story is true the demand was for the port authority to not only construct the giant menorah but to arrange a lighting ceremony. If true, then the rabbi deserves to be seen as the source of the problem rather than someone who brings a solution.

The 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that both Christmas trees and menorahs have long since crossed the line into secular symbols may have insulated the airport from additional legal challenges, but it's the nature of lawsuits that one is required to spend on defense well before they can be judged to be frivilous.

I'm an agnostic with a default lean towards atheism (which you may have misconceptions about, but I'm not going to get into that now) but had hoped that such petty problems over holiday decorations might be behind us.

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Comments

Tony Collett said…
Unfortunately, the link to the Supreme Court case goes to "No such case was found." As it asks for name of a case for searching, I am sorry I cannot help further.
1:30 PM
Mike Norton said…
Bizarre. Each time I looked it up and found the document it worked fine, but upon adding it as a link to the post it would come up with the "No such case was found" note. So, I finally changed the link to the cached version in Google.
5:12 PM
Doc Nebula said…
Say... you're not dead or anything up there, are you?

That would make me sad. :(
11:30 AM
Mike Norton said…
Not dead, just buried.

I'm anticipating a resurrection sometime Friday into Saturday, though someone might dump another shovelful on my head in the process.
12:07 PM
Doc Nebula said…
Okay, well... good to know. Hope you like the Xmas thingie.
2:15 PM
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