Rick Duncan wrote:
Richard is on to something here. The school play was trying to hijack Silent Night and convert it into a kind of easter bunny.
Do you really think that was the intent here? Is that the intent when churches perform the same play with their young children?
It is one thing for a public school to perform a harmless little play about a cold and lonely christmas tree. It is quite another thing for a school to perform a play that takes songs that mean a great deal to people who think Christmas is a religious holiday, and convert those songs into secular holiday muzak.
Except that all of the songs use familiar Christmas carol melodies, some of which were not religious in the first place. Were they also trying to secularize the already secular, or were they doing what is commonly done in lots of music written for very young children, which is take melodies they're already familiar with and build new songs around them? Do you really think that Dwight Elrich, who composed this little musical and is the musical director of the New Covenant Singers and the Bel Air Presbyterian Church, was part of the conspiracy against Christmas, or was he just trying to do a cute musical for kids using familiar carol melodies, some of them religious and some of them not?
The problem I have with all of this is that there is a reasonable interpretation of this and an unreasonable one. Mat Staver went with the most unreasonable one, the one that paints the author of the musical and the teachers at the school in the most evil possible light, and then threatened a Federal lawsuit that even in your own view had little chance of success in order to intimidate the school into caving in.
I would also note that if the standard by which one judges such incidents is whether schools are celebrating aspects of Christmas that are cultural in nature rather than religious, then by that standard they should be threatening lawsuits wherever a school uses Santa, reindeer, Christmas trees, strings of popcorn and virtually everything other than an advent candle and a nativity scene. All of those things are secular aspects of what, for Christians, is an explicitly religious holiday and are thus an "attempt to convert the religious into the secular".
Ed Brayton _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
