For the past few years, it has become increasingly evident that the foes of Christmas are on the run. Not that the War on Christmas is over—it is not—but it is clear that our side is pushing back with vigor.

When Wisconsin decided to revert back to calling the Christmas tree in the Capitol Rotunda a Christmas tree, no one complained. But when Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee stood fast in branding it a “Holiday” tree, he was met with a strong protest (pushed by us).

Freedom From Religion Foundation sought to counter the display of a nativity scene in Athens, Texas with one of its mocking statements, and the result was that 5,000 people took to the streets in support of the crèche on the grounds of the Henderson County Courthouse. Similarly, hundreds of residents in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania turned out to rally in support of their crèche.

The bottom line was unmistakable. In every instance when the people got mobilized, they did so in support of Christmas. There was not a single example to the contrary: the anti-Christmas folks amount to nothing more than a few atheist organizations and their lawyers.

After learning that David Silverman of American Atheists said that he believes there are many Christians who are really atheists, Bill Donohue answered by saying that he has it backwards: many atheists are really Christians, though they don’t know it. To that end, he instituted an “Adopt An Atheist” campaign. The goal of this initiative was to put Christians in contact with the chapters of American Atheists, hoping to win them over. Our campaign was met with predictable mean-spiritedness.

Some of the antics used to smash Christmas bordered on insanity. In a school in California, they literally banned poinsettias, Santa and Christmas trees. Though all are secular symbols, school officials said they were too closely associated with Christianity. In their wisdom, they allowed snowmen and snowflakes. And these people are educators.

In a South Carolina health center, they even gave a volunteer Santa the heave-ho.

We also had some light-hearted fun. When we found out that some diversity experts were advising companies to designate managers to police the behavior of employees at Christmas parties, we answered by calling for an open bar and designated managers to monitor the teetotalers.

If there is one personality quality that organized atheists share, it is their humorlessness. They not only miss out on the meaning and joy of Christmas, they sulk all day long. It’s who they are.

In December, the Catholic League filed two complaints against two attorneys for their incredibly anti-Catholic remarks. While we’ve learned of anti-Catholic comments made in court before, never have we witnessed anything like this.

On November 25, in a legal memorandum filed in the Bankruptcy Court in Minnesota, lawyer Rebekah Nett called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher “a Catholic Knight Witch Hunter.” Nett’s client, Naomi Isaccson, wrote the memo. The judge is not Catholic.

The memo also spoke of the “ignoramus bigoted Catholic beasts that carry the sword of the church,” and the “dirty Catholics” who have engaged in a “bloody and murderous” history. We filed a complaint in both Minnesota and Wisconsin against Nett.

Isaacson is president of Yehud-Monosson USA, named after a joint municipality in Israel; her company used to own gas stations and convenience stores in Minnesota.

While Judge Dreher was weighing a fine against both women for $10,000 each, Isaacson used more utterly bigoted language again. When we learned that she is also an attorney, we filed a complaint against her with the Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility.

See page 6 for a more thorough rendering of the explicit anti-Catholic remarks made by Nett and Isaacson. In early January we learned that the Minnesota lawyers’ office had already begun an investigation when they received our complaint.

FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK 
William Donohue

It does not matter how strongly a person may champion abortion rights, there are some stubborn facts that cannot be denied. It is their side—the pro-abortion side—that must tippy toe through a linguistic minefield. Our side never has to be careful, and that’s because we don’t have to lie.

If ever this was shown to be true, it was on grand display last summer when the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy story on the subject of “twin reduction.” The term was coined to describe a situation where a pregnant woman is notified she is carrying twins, but she only wants one. Hence, the decision to abort one of them. Now you know what “twin reduction” means.

The woman discussed in this article, “Unnatural Selection,” was 45 and had been trying for six years to get pregnant. She tried it all—ovulation injections, donor eggs—with nothing to show but her fertility bills. Then her luck changed. But when she learned she was carrying two children, it didn’t sit well with her. So when she was 14 weeks along, she chose to have what the writer aptly called “half an abortion.” Both babies were healthy, but one had to go. The woman’s reasoning was brutally honest.

“Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn’t had children already or if we were more financially secure. If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

If this sentiment doesn’t underscore the veracity of the Church’s teachings on life, nothing does. Unwittingly, to be sure, this woman hit on all the critical points. It was her unnatural pregnancy—the separation of marital love from procreation—that made her “twin reduction” decision so palatable. She is also right that there is a “natural order,” although she is either blissfully ignorant about its source, or simply doesn’t care. She is right again that it was her “consumerish” mentality that allowed her, and her supine husband, to “reduce” her pregnancy.

The author of this piece, Ruth Padawer, was eerily objective. “The procedure, which is usually performed around Week 12 of a pregnancy,” she said, “involves a fatal injection of potassium chloride into the fetal chest.” In other words, the poison is designed to kill. Indeed, she is not unaware of the outcome. “The dead fetus shrivels over time and remains in the womb until delivery.” She continues, “Some physicians found reduction unnerving, particularly because the procedure is viewed under ultrasound, making it quite visually explicit, which is not the case with abortion.” The eye doesn’t easily lie.

Choosing which kid to kill can be taxing. “If both appear healthy (which is typical with twins),” Padawer writes, “doctors aim for whichever one is easier to reach.” How good he aims is important. “If both are equally accessible, the decision of who lives and who dies is random.” The term “who lives” cannot logically refer to anything other than a human being, since there is no record of a woman giving birth to an elephant or a spider.

“To the relief of patients,” the author concludes, “it’s the doctor who chooses—with one exception.” And what could that be? “If the fetuses are different sexes, some doctors ask the parents which one they want to keep.” How thoughtful of them. But given the nature of the decision, it won’t be long before a “pre-twin reduction agreement” will be drawn up by their lawyer. By the way, they have a term to describe the baby who is selected to live—he or she is called a “singleton.”

In an article that is over 5000 words long, there is exactly one sentence that acknowledges the “feelings of guilt” that parents may experience. Of greater interest would be the “feelings of guilt” that the surviving child might have to eventually deal with. It merits one sentence. Regarding the likelihood that the surviving child may turn with anger toward his parents for depriving him of a sibling, nothing was said.

It’s not just our side that sees through this macabre of deceit. One of the more honest, if reluctant, advocates of abortion rights is William Saletan. Commenting on this article, he said, “the main problem with reduction is that it breaches a wall at the center of pro-choice psychology. It exposes the equality between the offspring we raise and the offspring we abort.” Ever blunt, he comments, “You can’t pretend that one is precious and the other is just tissue. You’re killing the same creature to which you’re dedicating your life.” At least he gets it.

It is telling that pro-lifers are not the ones who are tongue-tied when confronted with issues like “twin reduction.” It is similarly revealing that people like the author of the Times Magazine piece can describe the subject in such clinically cold terms.

Approximately 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and 96 percent celebrate Christmas. Of the 20 percent who are not Christian, non-believers make up the largest segment, though the number of self-identified atheists is tiny. David Silverman, president of American Atheists, knows this to be true, which is why he is frantically trying to inflate his base. “We want people to realize that there may be atheists in their family,” he told the New York Times, “even if those atheists don’t even know they are atheists.”

We thought that there was some merit in Silverman’s idea, even if he had things backwards, as usual. So in response to him, we recently launched our “Adopt An Atheist” campaign, the predicate of which was, “We want atheists to realize that there may be Christians in their community, even if those Christians don’t even know they are Christian.”

Here is what our campaign entailed. We asked everyone to contact the American Atheist affiliate in his area to let them know of his interest in “adopting” one of them. We asked our members to let the atheists know of their sincere interest in working with them to uncover their inner self. We said that the atheists may be resistant at first, but eventually they may come to understand that they were Christian all along.

Bill Donohue discussed the urgency of this campaign, “If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who ‘believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.’”

“If we can’t censor, then compete.” That’s the preferred modus operandi of many atheists out to smash Christmas. Their first instinct is to ban nativity scenes wherever they can. If that doesn’t work, then they lay claim to the same spot, seeking to display their anti-Christmas message.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is the most active atheist group using this two-prong strategy. In the Mississippi State Capitol, FFRF displayed a sign mocking religion; it also placed a similar display in the Wisconsin State Capitol. No town is too small for FFRF to infect, which is why it waged war in places like Athens, Texas and Prineville, Oregon. Sometimes the efforts of these radical atheists yield really ugly fruit: in Santa Monica, California, city officials used a lottery system to sort out all the requests for display on public property, the result this year being that atheists won most of the spots.

We have no problem with the tactics of the American Humanist Association: it does not seek to censor or compete—it simply posts its inoffensive message on billboards. But FFRF is cut from a different cloth, and so are the zealots at American Atheists.

Unfortunately, some government officials have taken the easy way out by electing to ban all displays. For example, last year the Catholic League protested the display of the menorah, a religious symbol, and the banning of a nativity scene, also a religious symbol, at the St. George Staten Island Ferry Terminal and in Boca Raton, Florida. This year the courageous souls who run things in both places chose to ban all displays.

There are two ways government can practice neutrality: the tolerant way, which is to allow all world religions a limited period of time to display their wares in the public square; and the intolerant way, favored by liberals, which is to censor everyone. We vote for the former.

In December, North Korea put South Korea on notice, warning of “unexpected consequences” if Seoul displays Christmas lights near the border. Also in December, Chinese government officials and police smashed the sound equipment of Christians who were about to celebrate Christmas in a village outside Beijing.

Our atheists share the same mindset, if not the same means.

In a South Carolina cancer center, a 67-year-old volunteer Santa was evicted because of the “different cultures and beliefs of the patients we care for”; it later reversed its decision. In an elementary school in Stockton, California, poinsettias were banned but somehow snowmen were permitted; they justified their censorship by saying there was a Sikh temple in the city (note: there is no evidence that Sikhs suffer apoplexy when they see poinsettias, but there is plenty of evidence that cultural fascists enjoy using them as a foil to justify their own intolerance).

A homosexual group on the campus of Washington and Jefferson College succeeded in getting the Dean to approve a condom-decorated Christmas tree. A skeleton St. Nick was found hanging from a cross on the grounds of the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg, Virginia.

Most atheists are not intolerant, but rare is the atheist qua activist who is not. Unfortunately, we don’t have to look overseas to Communist nations to witness this verity. That they show up at Christmastime, as well as at Easter, is proof that their real hatred is of all things Christian.

In Wisconsin, for the first time in years, they reverted back to calling the Capitol Rotunda Christmas tree a Christmas tree: it was called a Christmas tree for 70 years until it was renamed a Holiday tree in the mid-1980s.

In Rhode Island, Governor Lincoln Chafee decided to continue the politics of intolerance by calling the Capitol Rotunda Christmas tree a Holiday tree.

Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation explained why the Christmas tree in Wisconsin was rebranded the Holiday tree: “Calling it a Holiday tree was meant to be inclusive.” Ironically, it has proven to be divisive—the uproar was in Rhode Island, not Wisconsin.

According to the Providence Journal, 87 percent of the people in Rhode Island prefer to call the Christmas tree a Christmas tree; only 8 percent think it should be called a Holiday tree. In Wisconsin, there is no discord: calling the Christmas tree a Christmas tree has brought people together. Which is why Rhode Island should learn a lesson in civility and community by calling its Christmas tree a Christmas tree.

By the way, what holiday does the Holiday tree represent?

For the past few years, there have been two new developments in the War on Christmas: the good news is that more people are pushing back in villages and municipalities across the nation, demanding that Christmas celebrations proceed as planned; the bad news is that militant atheists are more aggressive than ever. Overall, however, there is evidence that the pro-Christmas side is winning the day.

On the positive front, the residents of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania turned out by the hundreds on December 2 to rally in support of their nativity scene. There is a live nativity scene on city property in Minden, Louisiana, and after some initial resistance, a church handbell group took command of the Springhill library’s courtyard. After a nativity scene was banned for years on the grounds of the Muskingum County Courthouse in Zanesville, Ohio, the county commissioners voted unanimously to put it back. Similarly, Wisconsin reverted back to its display of a Christmas tree at the state capitol. “Keep Christ in Christmas” was the banner that stretched across the street in Pitman, New Jersey, despite failed attempts by atheists to censor it.

On the negative front, a school counselor at an Arkansas elementary school was told to remove her posting of a nativity scene on her billboard; her decoration was permitted for more than 20 years.

Tulsa, Oklahoma long had a Christmas parade, but in recent years it was renamed the Holiday parade. But just as the people in Rhode Island sang Christmas songs at their secularized “Holiday” event, the people in Tulsa countered with their own Christmas parade. Indeed, we see more examples of the pro-Christmas side not settling for a secular outcome than its obverse. More important, when the anti-Christmas side pushes back, those doing it are activist atheists. When the pro-Christmas side pushes back, it’s a grassroots effort.

In short, “Power to the People” never sounded so good.

From December 16 to January 3, we erected a life-size nativity scene in Central Park, on the corner of 59th and 5th. Moreover, we did not surround it with secular symbols.

Every year we get a permit from the New York City Parks Department to display our nativity scene. We choose Central Park because it is a public forum, a place where concerts, marathons and all sorts of festivities take place. We do not seek to display our crèche on public property adjacent to City Hall, because that is the seat of government.

This needs to be said because there is considerable ignorance about this issue. For example, the New Jersey State League of Municipalities recently released a statement offering guidance to local officials planning holiday displays: “A purely religious display, especially one related to a single religion, is almost certainly unconstitutional.”

There is nothing “almost certain” about our response—they don’t know what they are talking about. If they were right, then we wouldn’t have been able to put up our crèche. There is a difference between a public forum and a state capitol building, etc.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas got it right when he lashed out at his colleagues for not accepting cases that might clarify this issue. On October 31, he said “we have learned that a crèche displayed on government property violates the Establishment Clause, except when it doesn’t. Likewise, a menorah displayed on government property violates the Establishment Clause, except when it doesn’t.” That is why he called for “a clear, workable standard.”

We hope New Yorkers and tourists alike had a chance to see our crèche. Our detractors should have seen it as well—it may have proved to be a real epiphany.

Lawyers who evince a deep-seated bigotry—against any segment of the population—have no business practicing law. In this regard, it would be hard to find two more unqualified attorneys than Rebekah Nett and Naomi Isaacson.

Nett was counsel to Isaacson, herself an Orthodox Jewish attorney, in a Minnesota bankruptcy case (see page 1). She not only entered into record comments made by her client that were reprehensible, she made her own sordid contribution.

Isaacson even berated the media. When interviewed by the “Pioneer Press,” which did the best coverage on this issue, she lashed out at the newspaper, and the Catholic Church. She asked if the paper was “owned by the Catholic Church or just a majority stockholder.” She described the Church as “dirty, filthy, and the most dangerous death cult in human history.”

The following comments illustrate why the Catholic League filed a formal complaint against these attorneys. They should ultimately be disbarred, but that is not in our purview.

Rebekah Nett

• Nett filed a memo written by her client, Naomi Isaacson, which said, “Across the country the court systems and particularly the Bankruptcy Court in Minnesota are composed of a bunch of ignoramus, bigoted Catholic beasts that carry the sword of the church.

• The memo called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher “a Catholic Knight Witch Hunter.

• The memo also called one bankruptcy trustee “a priest’s boy,” and another was branded a “Jesuitess.

• For her part, Nett called Dreher and other court personnel “dirty Catholics,” adding that “Catholic deeds throughout the [sic] history have been bloody and murderous.”

Naomi Isaacson

• In a filing of her own, Isaacson called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher “Popess Dreher” and “a secret Catholic Knight Witch Hunter.”

• She called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis O’Brien a “dastardly Jesuit.”

• She called the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee a “mindless numbnut [who] would follow church orders with a vengeance.”

• She accused judges and trustees of conspiring to liquidate the company’s assets “for pennies,” saying the proceeds will go “to members of the Catholic Church.”

• She referred to a contempt-of-court order by Judge Dreher saying, “We may as well flush her papal bull order down the toilet.”

• She said the court “is an arm of the church to force the minority to be converted or face the consequences just like during the Dark and Middle Ages.”

• She called one trustee a “Grand Inquisitor.”

• She called the attorney representing the U.S. Trustee Program a “Papal Drummer.”

• She said Judge O’Brien converted the case to Chapter 7 “on papal orders.”

• She accused the Church of bringing illegal immigrants to America “so their population can outrun that of the Protestants and they can turn the country into another Spain.”

• She said: “The Catholic Church has millions of Jesuits working undercover around the country to fulfill the church’s agenda.”