A CLUe That It's Christmas

It may be the Christmas season everywhere else, but it’s orgasm time on the 18th floor of 125 Broad Street in New York City. There, the organization which does such a good, if quiet, job of protecting our civil liberties the rest of the year, starts acting like a guy with a credit card in a whorehouse.

It’s Christmas, with all its decorations and finery; it’s a season both religious and secular. Or, a season, first religious, which has become secular with religious symbols all over the place.

For the ACLU, it’s like those drawings we’ve seen of the old West, where guys with rifles stood atop railcars and shot at herds of buffalo. There were so many targets it was almost too easy. Oddly enough, the buffalo survived but the guys shooting them were eventually banished by public outcry. The new riflemen have their hundreds of mangers in the crosshairs.

Sooner or later, a majority of people will start asking if having a manger scene on public property is really the same as congress passing a law establishing a national religion. Or if having the Ten Commandments in a courthouse will hurt those who don’t happen to follow that set of rules.

There’s a big difference between a national religion and a seasonal religious symbol on a piece of public property.

But, as I said, when your group orgasms only once a year, you take what you can get.