As we enter the last week before Christmas (has it been that soon? It seems like I got to California just yesterday, though it was Nov. 28), it's time we thought about what Christmas really means. If you're Bill O'Reilly, it's about forwarding the old straw man that the ACLU hates Christmas and religion and would like to see both destroyed in a massive, sodomistic fireball.

Or something like that.

The first major Christmas case the Supreme Court heard was Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984). In that case, respondents Donnelly, et al. objected to a Christmas display put up by the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The court ruled that a display that contained "a Santa Claus house, a Christmas tree, and a banner that reads 'SEASONS GREETINGS'" in addition to a Nativity scene was not in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Chief Justice Burger, author of the majority opinion in this 5-4 case, wrote that while a "wall" is a helpful metaphor for the boundary between church and state, the metaphor is not so simple in practice. "The Constitution does not require complete separation of church and state; it affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any," he wrote. (Chief Justice Rehnquist would later write about the "play in the joints" between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause in Locke v. Davey [02-1315]. In that case, he noted that "[t]here are some state actions permitted by the Establishment Clause but not required by the Free Exercise Clause." But that's a different issue.)

The point of Lynch was that a Nativity scene (also called a creche), placed in the context of celebrating the Christmas season -- while at the same time acknowledging other religions and secular traditions, did not "impermissibly [advance] religion or [create] an excessive entanglement between religion and government." But a problem with Lynch was that Burger relied heavily on the old "our country was founded on Christian principles" and "it's a Western tradition" arguments favored by Justice Scalia. (Recall that a thousand-year-old "western tradition" is permissible as justification for a ruling, but contemporary rulings from other courts around the world about the same issue are not.)

For five years, the world was safe from the Ghost of ACLU Present. But then, in 1989, the Supreme Court heard a case called Allegheny County v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989) in which the ACLU challenged the constitutionality of two holiday displays in downtown Pittsburgh. The Supreme Court again found that the creche, a menorah, and an angel bearing the banner "Gloria Excelsis Deo" (Glory to God in the highest) were not in violation of the Establishment Clause. The case was not a fun and easy one. It was affirmed in part and reversed in part, which means that the justices were horribly split.

In the 1980s, then, it seems that the Supreme Court entered the ring with the pre-conceived notion that Christmas had to be saved, and found ways in which they could save Christmas. But then again, Christmas is also pretty secular. You can see how the justices might be split on this issue.

There are other cases dealing with Christmas, but I don't want to spend seventy hours researching them today, so I'll make this a multi-volume entry.

In Mark News, I took the CBEST (California Basic Educational Skills Test), the test that all people who want to be teachers in California or Oregon must take. It was incredibly easy, and yet there are some people who fret about it a lot. The point of taking the CBEST was to get an emergency teaching (substitute-teaching) credential and be a sub for a while in either Oakland or Berkeley. I recently received my "un-official" score results in the email, indicating that I had passed. Unfortunately, I can't apply for any sub jobs yet because, while I may have unofficially passed the CBEST, I haven't "officially" passed it yet, and I don't have the emergency teaching credential yet.