Utah State Sen. Chris Buttars is at it again, this time catching up to that old right-wing conspiracy theory, "The War on Christmas."

Buttars (R-The Paleolithic Era) is sponsoring a resolution in the Utah Legislature to encourage retailers to stop saying "Happy Holidays" or other generic secular phrases - and instead say "Merry Christmas."

"I'm sick of the Christmas wars - we're a Christian nation and ought to use the word," Buttars (pictured here, doing his impression of Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life") told the Tribune's Cathy McKitrick.

Right-wing blowhards, Bill O'Reilly chief among them, have been trumping up the so-called "War on Christmas" for a few years now. They see isolated incidents of political correctness run amok (fights over public religious displays, stores putting up generic "holiday" slogans, etc.) as a concentrated effort to drive religion - specifically the Christian religion - from the public square.

It's all bullpucky, as Salon's Michelle Goldberg wrote in this 2005 article. Besides showing how the "War on Christmas" is nothing new (the whack-job John Birch Society talked about it in the '50s, and Henry Ford railed against it in his anti-Semitic screeds in the '20s), Goldberg dissected the current mania to declare war on "The War on Christmas":

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

If nothing else, Buttars' proposal again proves that Utah is late picking up on everything - even "The War on Christmas."

Labels: government, politics, religion