Karl Rove fumbled with his white board insisting the race wasn’t over and that the votes from vital Ohio counties had not yet been fully tallied. A glimmer of hope that Mitt Romney could snatch victory from the jaws of certain defeat remained visible through the squinting lens of Rove’s roseate stubbornness.
As his recount was underway last weekend in Florida, Congressman Allen West basked in the glow of adulation conservatives attending an event at the Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach beamed on him. Optimism filled the air as a smiling West posed for pictures with Fox News “happy warrior” Monica Crowley and others desperate for just a scrap of conservative vindication.
Conservatives are shell-shocked. The event in Palm Beach drew no consensus for the future of conservatism. After four years of economic, political and moral depredations, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict when the pendulum will swing back — or if it will at all.
Tuesday (11/19/2012), United States District Court Judge Audrey B Collins delivered a 28-
page ruling denying my client the right to continue a 59-year-old tradition of exhibiting Nativity scenes along Ocean Boulevard in the City of Santa Monica this Christmas season, another dagger plunged into the heart of America’s twilight customs and traditions. The sneered-at “war on Christmas” was effectively lost for good.
I say this even though the case has neither been dismissed (at least not yet) nor declared dead after appeals. Indeed, a hearing on the City of Santa Monica’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit is set for December 3, 2012. As lead counsel for the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee, a nonprofit made up of local churches and the police union, it is not my intention to surrender the cause. But the legal theories we presented to support the preservation of the Nativity tradition in Santa Monica and which the court rejected in their entirety are the identical legal theories advanced in opposition to the City’s motion to dismiss.
Christianity, white men, heterosexuality, meritocracy, Christmas. These are the relics of a distant culture. Let’s not kid ourselves. They have been tipping into the abyss for some time. Only now — plunging as we are with increasing velocity — do the tremors of our nation’s mortality begin to beat their throbbing rhythms insistently. Santa Monica’s Palisades Park is just the latest park to be “occupied” by a leftist regime’s ideological larceny. As the radical Sixties began to forge the nihilistic alloys of sexual promiscuity, anti-authoritarianism and identity politics, Peoples Park in Berkeley, California, became the epicenter of the big political power grab that only now is reaching the zenith of its destiny. People’s Park gave alienated young people license to “act creatively and together to build an environment uniquely theirs where they could celebrate the rituals of a new culture.”[1] Hark their heralding message: “Although they lost the park, most felt that it was only a battle in a war that they would win someday.”
F. J. Bardack was a leader in developing political tactics during the struggle for People’s Park. A leaflet he wrote in May 1969 foreshadowed the takeover we see realized by a Santa Monica city council dominated by Democrats, liberals, Irish Catholics and Kennedys. In “Who Owns the Park,”[2] Bardack traced the evolution of power plays culminating in the ownership of People’s Park by the state-run University of California. His historical timeline begins with the occupation of the Costanoan Indians, followed by Catholic missionaries, the Mexican government, the Americans, white settlers, and ultimately “rich white men,” who turned the property into one of the nation’s leading universities.
But Bardack had a warning ready for the rich, white men: “Your land is covered with blood…. Your people ripped off the land from the Indians a long time ago. If you want it back now, you will have to fight for it again.”
Since 1953, the coalition each December has erected a tableau of scenes depicting the birth of Jesus Christ.
A few years ago, the tradition offended Damon Vix, an atheist, who applied to put up a booth next to the Nativity story. Last year, he encouraged other atheists to flood the city with applications, including a satirical homage to the “Pastafarian religion” featuring a representation of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
To keep things fair and legal, the city held a lottery to parcel out slots. Atheists won 18 of 21 spaces. A Jewish group won another. The Nativity story that traditionally took up 14 displays was jammed into two.
A flap ensued. Vandals ripped down a banner the Freedom From Religion Foundation had hung at the park. The banner began: “At this season of the winter solstice, may reason prevail.”
Last June, concerned that the lottery would become increasingly costly because of the rising tensions, the City Council voted to ban all private, unattended displays in city parks. The city has cited other reasons for the prohibition, including damage to the park’s turf and some residents’ statements that they would prefer unobstructed ocean views to seasonal displays.
Council members and the city attorney’s office said groups wishing to celebrate the Nativity, the winter solstice or Hanukkah had alternatives. They could, for example, erect displays on private property or station a representative at any display on public ground.
In October, the coalition filed suit, seeking to restore the tradition. At the time, Becker said it was “not the government’s function to avoid controversy at the cost of fundamental rights.”
Barry A. Rosenbaum, with the Santa Monica city attorney’s office, said the city was pleased with the ruling. The judge, he said, “understood the government interests.”
U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins rejected a motion from the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee to allow the religious display this season while their lawsuit plays out against the city.
Collins said the city was within its constitutional right to eliminate the exemption that had allowed the Nativity at the oceanfront Palisades Park because the change affected all comers — from Christians to Jews to atheists — and provided other avenues for public religious speech.
The coalition of churches that had put on the life-sized, 14-booth Nativity display for decades argued the city banned it rather than referee a religious dispute that began three years ago when atheists first set up their anti-God message alongside the Christmas diorama.
The trouble in Santa Monica began in 2009, when atheist Damon Vix applied for and was granted a booth in Palisades Park alongside the story of Jesus Christ’s birth.
Vix hung a simple sign that quoted Thomas Jefferson: “Religions are all alike — founded on fables and mythologies.” The other side read “Happy Solstice.” He repeated the display the following year but then upped the stakes significantly.
In 2011, Vix recruited 10 others to inundate the city with applications for tongue-in-cheek displays such as an homage to the “Pastafarian religion,” which would include an artistic representation of the great Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The secular coalition won 18 of 21 spaces. Two others went to the traditional Christmas displays and one to a Hanukkah display.
The atheists used half their spaces, displaying signs such as one that showed pictures of Poseidon, Jesus, Santa Claus and the devil and said: “37 million Americans know myths when they see them. What myths do you see?”
Most of the signs were vandalized and in the ensuing uproar, the city effectively ended a tradition that began in 1953 and earned Santa Monica one of its nicknames, the City of the Christmas Story.
For his part, Vix said he was pleased with Monday’s ruling, but was also saddened by the anger being directed against atheists since he hung his first anti-God sign in 2009.
“So many people don’t understand atheists,” he said. “If you read the signs we put up, one said, ‘Love is all around you.’ That’s really a better understanding of who most atheists are.”