The so-called "War on Christmas" is so last year. And the year before. And the year before that. But each year right about this time right-wing Christians in America are reminded about how they're cruelly persecuted every time they see a city hall lawn without a manger scene or they check out at K-Mart only to have the clerk utter a soulless "Happy Holidays" or they get a card in the mail depicting Santa Claus instead of the Baby Jesus.
It's a hard life. Just ask Mike Huckabee. He gets it.
"It's not a matter of turning the other cheek," Huckabee told the Baptist Press. "Atheists resent that there's a holiday that Christians can celebrate."
As Dan Savage points out on Slog, a lot of atheists celebrate Christmas too.
"Atheists celebrating Christmas – it should warm Huckabee's heart," Savage writes. "As should the ability of post-Christian atheists to take enjoyment – in a secular and hedonistic sense – from the Christmas holiday. I mean, it's evidence of Christianity's cultural triumph, right? But Huckabee won't take the compliment, of course, not so long as there's a political benefit to stoking the paranoia and delusions of oppression that characterize the GOP's evangelical base."
But hey, Huckabee is, after all, the author of "Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America."
That's right. According to Huckabee, the harbinger of common sense in America is a movement that claims to be persecuted by all things secular while at the same time declaring war on gay families.
"It's perfectly legitimate in our culture today to engage in outright persecution against Christians with seemingly no social penalty for doing it, whether it's tearing a cross out of a lady's hand in California who happened to support Proposition 8 or the denigration of Christian values by not allowing even the traditional Christmas carols to be sung at a school," Huckabee said.
Okay, slapping a cross out of a lady's hand during a protest is a crappy thing to do. But using that cross to justify stripping citizens of equal rights is a misuse of God and country.
"(W)e shouldn't have special rules for everybody but Christians and then those rules are pushed and we become the persecuted," Huckabee said.
What is it with right-wing Christians and their obsession with "special rules?" They campaign against equal protection for gays by saying that gays don't deserve "special rights" – like, say, renting an apartment without the fear that you'll be booted out on your ass if your landlord doesn't like gay people – and now Huckabee is crying that they are the ones that want special rules?
Need I remind Huckabee that, as a lesbian in Michigan, I can't legally marry my partner. I can't receive her pension should she, God forbid, die before me (should pensions even exist in the future). I can't be a legal parent to our future child. I can't be on her health insurance or she on mine. Hospitals don't have to let me in the room should she be admitted. And on and on.
And yet, for the past two months, I can't go into a CVS or Costco without hearing "Away In A Manger" or "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." So for Christ's sake, Huckabee, quit your bitching.
