Chicago Anti-Christian Left Digs Itself in Deeper on Christkindlmarkt

The Chicago Tribune editorial tries to make sense of the mess.

The Mayor's office put the screws to the organisers of Chicago's traditional German-American Christmas bazaar--the Christkindlmarkt--to prevent advertisements for the new motion picture "The Nativity Story" from being prominently featured at the bazaar, located as it has been for years at the publicly owned Daley Plaza.

The ironies are incredible. First, the Mayor's office decided to intervene ostensibly to prevent attendees at the Christkindlmarkt--the name means "Christ Child Market"--from an offensive exposure to Christian belief, as though the very existence of the Christkindlmarkt itself were not a complete bathing in traditional German Christian observance.

Then, when challenged, the Mayor's office attempted to take refuge in a bash of capitalism by denouncing the advertisements for the film as "excessively commercial," again as though the Christkindlmarkt itself were some sort of free-will offering with nothing to do with money.

In this, the Mayor's office has merely recapitulated a common anti-Christian ploy: attacking Christmas through the proxy of attacking popular observances which are determined arbitrarily to fail the secular person's suddenly high standards of taste and decorum. The same people who defend peepshows in downtown Manhattan as triumphs of freedom of expression will then condemn the commercialisation of Christmas because large numbers of people want their children to be happy on Christmas morning, or want to see Hollywood and the Show Business juggernaut validate their families' commitment to a two-thousand year old story which has induced greater charitable activity and social reform than any other narrative in human history.

Philo-Junius indulges a great curiosity as to the opinions of the numinous Sen. Rorschach (D-IL) on this issue simultaneously with an equally great confidence that no media organisation will seek to obtain that opinion.