Two excellent columns at http://www.townhall.com/ today. The first is by Linda Chavez, Schools are Distorting Thanksgiving.
Apparently some school officials worry that the religious overtones of Thanksgiving might represent a chink in the wall secularists insist separates church and state, so they proscribe any mention of Who it is the nation thanks on this day.
George Washington had no such qualms when he proclaimed the first day of
thanksgiving in 1789: “It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the
providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits,
and humbly to implore His protection and favor.”
Many public school systems have removed Christianity from Thanksgiving, by focusing more on the Wampanoag traditions and belief in Kiehtan, their name for the Creator, and completely omitting any information on the Pilgrims’ spiritual beliefs.
Michelle Malkin, in Grace, Gratitude, and God, says that “Once an unabashedly pious land, we have been transformed into a nation of historically clueless ingrates — embarrassed about our heritage, afraid of offending all newcomers, and more committed to inculcating a sense of entitlement over a culture of gratitude.”
It seems that, in the name of multiculturalism, we are destroying our own culture. In the name of “separation of church and state,” we are watering down our own history. In the name of religious diversity, we are allowing lawyers and the judicial system to make us afraid of mentioning anything related to Christianity in a public context.
If you’re a little town in rural USA, with no real ability to fight it, national pressure can be exerted to remove any display of the Ten Commandments from any government property. Nevermind that the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC has numerous displays of the Ten Commandments.
In Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation, he said:
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, the many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us!
But we certainly can’t make reference to that God now, not even in historical context. One nation “under God” has already been attacked. I have no doubt that it will soon be “In God We Trust” that will receive the national attention. Then it will be the presidential custom of ending speeches with “God bless America”. Once there are no current targets left, they’re likely to be culling old famous speeches, removing any reference to God from our culture.