http://blog.au.org/2006/02/christmas_calum.html
February 01, 2006
Christmas Calumny: School District Challenges Liberty Counsel’s Bogus ‘Christmas War’
Fox News Network has moved beyond its nightly carping about a so-called “war on Christmas,” and the holiday season is fast fading into memory. But one skirmish remains from the recent Christmas conflict.
A Wisconsin public school district is boldly fighting back against a Jerry Falwell-affiliated Religious Right group that spread lies about the school’s holiday policies and programs.
The Dodgeville School District has demanded that Liberty Counsel issue a public apology for a press release it issued in early December claiming that Ridgeway Elementary School officials had secularized the lyrics to numerous religious songs, such as “Silent Night,” in the school’s holiday programs. The district is also asking for $23,899.48 in compensation for costs that officials incurred in refuting the lies about their community.
“Your dissemination of false and misleading information and your threats of specious and frivolous litigation resulted in enormous cost the district,” wrote school attorney Eileen A. Brownlee, in a letter last week to Liberty Counsel. “You have yet to present the facts either through a press release, one of your ‘alerts’ or through any other means. You used this red herring to attempt to collect money through the form of donations.”
Liberty Counsel, headed by Falwell associate Mat Staver, conducted a “Friend or Foe” campaign “to educate about the law regarding the celebration of Christmas.” That campaign, which was endorsed by Falwell, amounted to an insidious effort to bully public school officials and convince the American public that the Christian holiday was under siege by crazed secularists.
Staver, Falwell and other Religious Right figures appeared numerous times throughout the month of December on Fox News programs such as “The O’Reilly Factor” and “The Big Story With John Gibson” to ignobly spread far-fetched claims of an alleged attack on Christianity in America. Gibson also used the Fox segments to flog his book, an entire tome about the fictional war on Christmas.
In a Dec. 7 press release, Liberty Counsel accused the Ridgeway Elementary school of secularizing its holiday celebrations and said it had sent officials a letter demanding the holiday programs be fixed or be prepared for potential litigation.
The allegation was baseless. Indeed, the Dodgeville Public School District posted on its Web site a statement explaining its holiday program and revealing the mendacity of Liberty Counsel’s claims.
Despite this clear factual record, Liberty Counsel’s Web site still makes no mention of the correspondence from Dodgeville and its Dec. 7 press release about the fabricated attack on Christmas at Ridgeway Elementary remains accessible.
In a Jan. 27 editorial, The Capital Times, a Madison daily, lauded the school district for its action and blasted Liberty Counsel for conspiring in “the faked-up national ‘debate’ about a so-called ‘war on Christmas’ – which was, essentially, a scheme by the Fox cable news network to drive up ratings….”
Dodgeville Superintendent Diane Messer hopes Liberty Counsel will do the right thing.
“I would like to believe that given their Christian basis, that somebody there would realize right is right,” she told the Wisconsin State Journal. “And since they used their actions as part of their fundraising campaign certainly something should be forthcoming. If nothing more than a token of compensation for what they unfairly subjected us to.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State on several occasions challenged the “Christmas war” allegations of O’Reilly, Gibson, Falwell and Liberty Counsel. We hope the actions of public schools officials like those in Dodgeville, Wis., will cause these grinches on the right to think twice next season before blustering incessantly about a cooked-up cultural battle over Christmas.
--Jeremy Leaming
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