Iowa town tries to rename Good Friday “Spring Holiday” during Holy Week

posted at 3:33 pm on March 30, 2010 by Cassy Fiano
[ Political Correctness ]   

Yeah, this wasn’t a huge slap in the face to Christians or anything.

One week before the most solemn day in the Christian year, the city of Davenport, Iowa removed Good Friday from its municipal calendar, setting off a storm of complaints from Christians and union members whose contracts give them that day off.

Taking a recommendation by the Davenport Civil Rights Commission to change the holiday’s name to something more ecumenical, City Administrator Craig Malin sent a memo to municipal employees announcing Good Friday would officially be known as “Spring Holiday.”

“My phone has been ringing off the hook since Saturday,” said city council alderman Bill Edmond. “People are genuinely upset because this is nothing but political correctness run amok.”

Edmond said the city administrator made the change unilaterally and did not bring it to the council for a vote, a requirement for a change in policy.

“The city council didn’t know anything about the change. We were blind sided and now we’ve got to clean this mess up. How do you tell people the city renamed a 2,000 year old holiday?” said Edmond.

It didn’t take long for the city the resurrect the name Good Friday. Malin was overruled today and the words “Spring Holiday” disappeared.

… The Civil Rights Commission said it recommended changing the name to better reflect the city’s diversity and maintain a separation of church and state when it came to official municipal holidays.

“We merely made a recommendation that the name be changed to something other than Good Friday,” said Tim Hart, the commission’s chairman. “Our Constitution calls for separation of church and state. Davenport touts itself as a diverse city and given all the different types of religious and ethnic backgrounds we represent, we suggested the change.”

Please. This PC crap in the name of some kind of phony “diversity” pisses me off. And of course, it wasn’t the angry residents that changed the city council’s mind — it was the unions.

City employees, beginning with local police, feared the name change would violate their union contracts with the city, which specifies Good Friday as an official municipal holiday. Employees that work city holidays are paid time and a half.

For all of the separationists’ bluster, it’s an empty premise. The words “separation of church and state” appear nowhere in the Constitution. This entire idea came from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists, ensuring them that there would be a “wall of separation” between the church and the state — and he didn’t mean that Christianity couldn’t be expressed or honored in the public or by the government. He meant that state would not interfere with religion, an idea that actually is in the Constitution. What also is in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are many, many references to God and Christianity. But what does that matter? Whenever someone uses the word diversity in reference to the so-called separation of church and state, all they mean is a lack of Christianity in the public. Christians, according to separationists, should apparently only practice their faith in the privacy of their own homes. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, atheists — they’re all free to practice publicly, but not Christians.

After all, have you ever seen Hanukah referred to as “holidays in winter”? Or a movement for Rosh Hashana or Ramadan to be removed from calendars? Of course not. It’s only Christianity that is targeted. And there you have the truth: the separationist movement is nothing more than a movement to ban Christianity from the public square while allowing for politically correct “diverse” religions to be celebrated.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!

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