This article says it all, much better than I ever could, about the latest "culture war".
O?Reilly sees the War on Christmas as part of the ?secular progressive agenda,? because ?if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.? Just as Christmas itself evolved as a way to synthesize a variety of winter festivals, so the War on Christmas fantasy is a way of grouping together a variety of enemies, where they can all be rhetorically machine-gunned at once. But the suspicion remains that a truer explanation for Fox?s militancy may be, like so much else at Yuletide, business. Christmas is the big retail season. What Fox retails is resentment.
In this war, no weapons of Christmas destruction have been found?just a few caches of linguistic oversensitivity and commercial caution. Christmas remains robust: even Gibson says in his book that in America Christmas celebrators (ninety-six per cent) outnumber Christians (eighty-four per cent). But the ?Happy Holidays? contagion has probably spread too far to be wiped out. ?President Bush and I wish everyone a very happy holiday,? Laura Bush says sweetly on a video posted on the White House Web site. And even the Fox News online store advertised, until a couple of weeks ago, ?The O?Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament.? (?Put your holiday tree in ?The No Spin Zone.? ?)