Bah Humbug! Nativity Scene Controversy

I share your frustration over the display of holiday items. Like you, I would not find it offensive for other faiths, or even atheists, to celebrate their beliefs in public. There is a double standard. Holidays are commercialized to the benefit of the stores that sell holiday products--I was in Target yesterday, and they have most of their Christmas stuff up already--but have an eight foot creche discovered after over six decades on a public median and suddenly you have a Constitutional crisis of Biblical proportions. Pun fully intended.

Back when I was taking my coursework for my doctorate, I had to take a class in educational law. This was in the mid-90s when the "English First" debates were raging. We had long discussions over the "tyranny of the majority" versus the "tyranny of the minority." One thing we could agree on is the Constitution does protect us from tyranny from either side most of the time.

Now, 15 years later, I'm not sure our discussions would be the same. The polarization is so much more pronounced, and I think the climate of the country politically, as well as legally, has moved toward the minority side (both right and left) wielding legal power through private financing.

It seems radically different than the civil rights movements to protect the rights of minorities, groups of people, who had suffered oppression by the majority through historical and legal prejudices. Now the law is being used all too often to manufacture minorities, and then fund legal proceedings to punish the majority, or even real minorities, just because they can. A minority of one can now take offense at just about anything, and use the law to punish the majority for being, well, just the majority.