22 Congressmen Hate Christmas

[cablewithaview]

This year's "War for Christmas" – keeping "Christ" in the holiday has apparently been won. And, like many "wars," there has even been a Congressional resolution in support of keeping Christmas alive and well.


On December 15 the House of Representatives passed a resolution "protecting the symbols and traditions of Christmas" by an overwhelming 401-22 vote.



Representative JoAnn Davis (R-VA), the resolution's sponsor, said the resolution was necessary to counter "political correctness run amok."


"No one," she said, "should feel like they have done something wrong by wishing someone a Merry Christmas."


Twenty-two Democrats played Scrooge and disagreed.



Representative Robert Scott (D-VA) said Republicans were more concerned with the symbolism rather than the substance of Christmas – referring to Republican passage of a bill to slow the rate of growth in federal entitlement programs.

Davis lodged a preemptive response to critics who might question the constitutionality of her resolution.

"Celebrating Christmas is not a violation of separation of church and state," she said. "The Framers intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution would prohibit the establishment of religion, not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialogue."


The text of the resolution read as follows:



Whereas Christmas is a national holiday celebrated on December 25; and


Whereas the Framers intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States would prohibit the establishment of religion, not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialog: Now, therefore be it resolved, that the House of Representatives –


(1) Recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas;
(2) Strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and
(3) Expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions, for those who celebrate Christmas.

As the Christmas season draws to a close, we thought we would share the names of the 22 Congressman who voted against the pro-Christmas resolution:




Congressman Party-State District
Ackerman D-NY 5th
Blumenauer D-OR 3rd
Capps D-CA 23rd
Cleaver D-MO 5th
DeGette D-CO 1st
Harman D-CA 36th
Hastings D-FL 23rd
Honda D-CA 15th
Lee D-CA 9th
Lewis D-GA 5th
McDermott D-WA 7th
Miller, George D-CA 7th
Moore D-WI 4th
Moran D-VA 8th
Payne D-NJ 10th
Rush D-IL 1st
Schakowsky D-IL 9th
Scott D-VA 3rd
Stark D-CA 13th
Wasserman Schultz D-FL 20th
Wexler D-FL 19th
Woolsey D-CA 6th


http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/22/172328.shtml

 

[MikeD-C05]

Let's all wish the 22 representatives a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

 

[dturturro]

Let's try getting a life first. there's Christmas trees, wreaths, lights and sales everywhere. You know what I have yet to see?

CHRIST. Santa? All over the place!

Maybe we all need a little perspective. Learn from Christ and turn the other cheek.

 

[HokieEngineer]

Sure glad they have their priorities in order. Wouldn't want to waste time working for hurricane victims or the poor. Lets debate Christmas, and what it means to different people. Why are some people so obsessed over "WAR"?

 

[CPanther95]

What a great thread title.

 

[long_time_DNC]

Here's a good one I heard on the news this morning:
Evidently there was some big vote in Congress today and only one Senator showed up for it.
Why do these people get paid for not showing up to do their job?

 

[dogpoobob]

Sure glad they have their priorities in order. Wouldn't want to waste time working for hurricane victims or the poor. Lets debate Christmas, and what it means to different people. Why are some people so obsessed over "WAR"?

If they give any more tax money to the hurricane victims, we'll have everyone in the south running for the coast next time there's a storm. Congress sent another 21 million down yesterday.

 

[long_time_DNC]

Actually, it was 29 Billion...

From what I've seen (video) and the people from my office who went there to help, it'll take years to rebuild that area...

 

[T2k]

If they give any more tax money to the hurricane victims, we'll have everyone in the south running for the coast next time there's a storm. Congress sent another 21 million down yesterday.

So you're saying is much better if we spend it on completly useless, retarded legislative circus atcs like this Christmas BS?

 

[T2k]

This year's "War for Christmas" – keeping "Christ" in the holiday has apparently been won. And, like many "wars," there has even been a Congressional resolution in support of keeping Christmas alive and well.
On December 15 the House of Representatives passed a resolution "protecting the symbols and traditions of Christmas" by an overwhelming 401-22 vote.
Representative JoAnn Davis (R-VA), the resolution's sponsor, said the resolution was necessary to counter "political correctness run amok."
"No one," she said, "should feel like they have done something wrong by wishing someone a Merry Christmas."
Twenty-two Democrats played Scrooge and disagreed.
Representative Robert Scott (D-VA) said Republicans were more concerned with the symbolism rather than the substance of Christmas – referring to Republican passage of a bill to slow the rate of growth in federal entitlement programs.
Davis lodged a preemptive response to critics who might question the constitutionality of her resolution.
"Celebrating Christmas is not a violation of separation of church and state," she said. "The Framers intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution would prohibit the establishment of religion, not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialogue."
The text of the resolution read as follows:
Whereas Christmas is a national holiday celebrated on December 25; and
Whereas the Framers intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States would prohibit the establishment of religion, not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialog: Now, therefore be it resolved, that the House of Representatives –
(1) Recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas;
(2) Strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and
(3) Expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions, for those who celebrate Christmas.
As the Christmas season draws to a close, we thought we would share the names of the 22 Congressman who voted against the pro-Christmas resolution:
Congressman Party-State District
Ackerman D-NY 5th
Blumenauer D-OR 3rd
Capps D-CA 23rd
Cleaver D-MO 5th
DeGette D-CO 1st
Harman D-CA 36th
Hastings D-FL 23rd
Honda D-CA 15th
Lee D-CA 9th
Lewis D-GA 5th
McDermott D-WA 7th
Miller, George D-CA 7th
Moore D-WI 4th
Moran D-VA 8th
Payne D-NJ 10th
Rush D-IL 1st
Schakowsky D-IL 9th
Scott D-VA 3rd
Stark D-CA 13th
Wasserman Schultz D-FL 20th
Wexler D-FL 19th
Woolsey D-CA 6th
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/22/172328.shtml

To balance out this idiotic story, here's an answer...


"The War Against Christmas"

Not since Iraqi WMD has there been a bogus news story more loved by the conservative media than the quote-unquote "War against Christmas." So complete is their martyrdom-like passion for this myth that you'd think we lived in a time when Christians were regularly being fed to Coliseum lions. Therefore, while I rather like the holiday myself, as editor of The Nation I feel duty bound to provide their empty, bloviated rhetoric with some ammo. Here are my three battles against Xmas.

1) Family-photo Christmas cards that married people send to their single, childless friends. Would you send a Thanksgiving card to starving people? A Fourth of July card to the Queen? These are not gifts; they are taunts. And they should be banned.

2) Corporate America's year-end decisions to reduce health and pension benefits to boost their annual earnings statements. Would Santa threaten to open a factory in Shanghai to bring the elf union to the negotiating table? What could be more bah-humbug than the news that daddy can never afford to retire? This Scrooge-like practice should be banned.

3) Christmas office parties. Sure, they seem fun, but nothing spells sexual harassment lawsuit like an open bar, mistletoe, and the prospect of spending the holidays alone or with an angry spouse. I think this is one area where Bill O'Reilly and I can agree: Christmas office parties should be banned.

What's really going on? The guys over at Fox, like O'Reilly and John Gibson (author of the new book, The War On Christmas) are using this battle because they'd like to see America trend theocratic. But despite the hours of attention the rightwing media have devoted to this manufactured crisis, they're unlikely to win. And it's not because they're up against a liberal plot. Gimme a break. It's because they're on the side of intolerance.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=42543

 

[CPanther95]

like this Christmas BS?

You will be visited by three ghosts. each at the stroke of 1 .........

 

[T2k]

You will be visited by three ghosts. each at the stroke of 1 .........

Did you notice the this at the front?

 

[T2k]

Anyway, my favourite article on this 'War on Christmas' BS is from the latest New Yorker Magazine:

BAH HUMBUG
Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02
Posted 2005-12-19

Chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, with Jack Frost nipping at your nose and folks dressed up like Eskimos—or, to update the line for political correctness, with tots in boots just like Aleuts. It’s that magical season when lights twinkle and good will abounds. It’s time again for the thrill that comes but once a year: the War on Christmas.

The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist. What does exist is the idea of the War on Christmas, which, though forever new, is a venerable tradition, older even than strip malls and plastic mistletoe. Christmas itself, in something like its recognizably modern form, with gifts and cards and elves, dates from the early nineteenth century. The War on Christmas seems to have come along around a hundred years later, with the publication of “The International Jew,” by Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, whom fate later punished by arranging to have his fortune diverted to the sappy, do-gooder Ford Foundation. “It is not religious tolerance in the midst of religious difference, but religious attack that they”—the Jews—“preach and practice,” he wrote. “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and certain patriotic songs shows that.” Ford’s anti-Semitism has not aged well, thanks to the later excesses of its European adherents, but by drawing a connection between Christmasbashing and patriotism-scorning he pointed the way for future Christmas warriors.

Over the next few decades, when the country was preoccupied with the Depression, the Second World War, and going to movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the W. on C. went into remission. But at the end of the placid nineteen-fifties the John Birch Society, a pioneering organization of the bug-eyed right, took up the Yuletide cudgels. As Michelle Goldberg recalled recently in Salon, a 1959 Birch pamphlet warned that “the Reds” and “the U.N. fanatics” had launched an “assault on Christmas” as “part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the U.N., but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs.” The enemy’s strategy, the Birchers warned, was to aim at the soft underbelly and shake it like a bowlful of jelly. “What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize U.N. symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.” The focus on department stores was a prophetic insight, but its full potential as a weapon in Christmas war-fighting was not realized until the next century.

Today’s Christmas Pentagon is the Fox News Channel, which during a recent five-day period carried no fewer than fifty-eight different segments about the ongoing struggle, some of them labelled “Christmas under attack.” One of Fox’s on-air warriors is John Gibson, whose new book, “The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought,” presents itself as the definitive word. So one opens it eagerly with hopes of learning what this war actually consists of. These hopes are soon dashed—or, rather, fulfilled, since it turns out to consist of very little. Gibson provides a half-dozen or so anecdotes, padded out to stupefying length, in which a school board or a city hall renames its Christmas break a winter break or declines to rename its winter break a Christmas break, or removes Christmas trees from the lobbies of government buildings and then restores them after people complain. “The war on Christmas,” the author concludes triumphantly, “is joined.”

Gibson is a mere grunt in Fox’s army. Bill O’Reilly, the network’s most prominent religio-political commentator, is its Patton. The shortage of anti-Christmas atrocities (plus the fact that the U.N. fanatics long ago switched to subverting Halloween) may explain why he has concentrated on department stores, many of which, in their ads or via their salespeople, wish people “Happy Holidays” instead of—or in addition to, or more frequently than—“Merry Christmas.” (In 1921, Henry Ford attacked from the opposite flank, sneering that “the strange inconsistency of it all is to see the great department stores of the Levys and the Isaacs and the Goldsteins and the Silvermans filled with brilliant Christmas cheer.”)

O’Reilly sat out Vietnam. In the war on the War on Christmas, however, he not only has been in the trenches but has gone over the top. “I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday!” he said the other day. And, “I’m going to use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that!” And, “There is no reason on this earth that all of us cannot celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together!” And, “And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me!”

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.’ ”)

John Lennon, who died in this city, at this season, twenty-five years ago, didn’t bother with “Happy Holidays” and the like. In 1971, he and his wife, Yoko Ono, wrote and recorded a song that has become a classic. Here’s its final verse:

A very Merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now.

That’s the spirit, John. You bet we want it. And Merry Christmas to all.

Source

 

[CPanther95]

The one thing I don't really get is the sudden problem with "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" which nobody has really had a problem with for the past 50 years.

I also don't get the reason, except extreme political correctness, to include Kwanzaa as a mandatory mention whenever mentioning Christmas or Hanukkah. It isn't a religious holiday, and not even a holiday - just something some guy came up with 30 or 40 years ago after the Watts riots. Can we start an Audio -Video holiday between Christmas and New Years where we watch a different movie every night?

 

[Purogamer]

Why a "war on christmas" is an easy question to answer...They can WIN this war. Notice how it's taken a lot of attention away from all the nonsense going on in washington and Iraq? I have...There's no war on christmas, christmas is fine and it was fine a month ago.

Maybe those 22 congressman voted no because they realize not everyone is christian. Maybe they realized how absurd it was to vote for this nonsense and realized that if everyone voted yes, they'd have to waste time voting for other silly ass things in the future...

What the hell are we even arguing about here?

 

[MikeD-C05]

IT is just a way to get people distracted from the real problems in the country like the War in Iraq , the pensions going bye bye in the country's companies, etc. They really don't want to talk about the real problems , much easier to talk about idealogical problems that keep people divided . Plus it is only an issue for a month every year and then it is gone.

 

[T2k]

The one thing I don't really get is the sudden problem with "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" which nobody has really had a problem with for the past 50 years.
I also don't get the reason, except extreme political correctness, to include Kwanzaa as a mandatory mention whenever mentioning Christmas or Hanukkah. It isn't a religious holiday, and not even a holiday - just something some guy came up with 30 or 40 years ago after the Watts riots. Can we start an Audio -Video holiday between Christmas and New Years where we watch a different movie every night?

I agree, this whole Kwanzaa is completely laughable and utterly stupid and ridiculous.

Creating a never-existed holiday just for the sake of having one is nothing but a perfect example how empty is the heritage and culture of that person.

 

[sikma]

Have you ever noticed that most of the 'bogus' issues our government takes up all started with the media deciding something is NOW a big issue. If we were not constantly being force-fed information the media thinks we need to know and care about, government could get back to work (for real).

The masses put WAY TOO MUCH credence in what the media decides is important enough to focus on and make an issue out of.

 

[dragon002]

This year's "War for Christmas" – keeping "Christ" in the holiday has apparently been won. And, like many "wars," there has even been a Congressional resolution in support of keeping Christmas alive and well.
On December 15 the House of Representatives passed a resolution "protecting the symbols and traditions of Christmas" by an overwhelming 401-22 vote.
Representative JoAnn Davis (R-VA), the resolution's sponsor, said the resolution was necessary to counter "political correctness run amok."
"No one," she said, "should feel like they have done something wrong by wishing someone a Merry Christmas."
Twenty-two Democrats played Scrooge and disagreed.
Representative Robert Scott (D-VA) said Republicans were more concerned with the symbolism rather than the substance of Christmas – referring to Republican passage of a bill to slow the rate of growth in federal entitlement programs.
Davis lodged a preemptive response to critics who might question the constitutionality of her resolution.
"Celebrating Christmas is not a violation of separation of church and state," she said. "The Framers intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution would prohibit the establishment of religion, not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialogue."
The text of the resolution read as follows:
Whereas Christmas is a national holiday celebrated on December 25; and
Whereas the Framers intended that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States would prohibit the establishment of religion, not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialog: Now, therefore be it resolved, that the House of Representatives –
(1) Recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas;
(2) Strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and
(3) Expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions, for those who celebrate Christmas.
As the Christmas season draws to a close, we thought we would share the names of the 22 Congressman who voted against the pro-Christmas resolution:
Congressman Party-State District
Ackerman D-NY 5th
Blumenauer D-OR 3rd
Capps D-CA 23rd
Cleaver D-MO 5th
DeGette D-CO 1st
Harman D-CA 36th
Hastings D-FL 23rd
Honda D-CA 15th
Lee D-CA 9th
Lewis D-GA 5th
McDermott D-WA 7th
Miller, George D-CA 7th
Moore D-WI 4th
Moran D-VA 8th
Payne D-NJ 10th
Rush D-IL 1st
Schakowsky D-IL 9th
Scott D-VA 3rd
Stark D-CA 13th
Wasserman Schultz D-FL 20th
Wexler D-FL 19th
Woolsey D-CA 6th
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/22/172328.shtml

gee , i see that HALF of them came from the wonderful socialist states of california, new york and illinios.......some things never change

have a wonderful CHRISTMAS !!! to all of you.

 

[sksatellite]

Ho Ho Ho

The Damn Democrates