Oh, goody - more free publicity for Utah, courtesy of our own Chris Buttars.

The state senator from West Jordan was named "Worst Person in the World" Tuesday by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on his "Countdown" show, for his idea to introduce a resolution in the Utah Legislature encouraging retailers to say "Merry Christmas" instead of the more generic "Happy Holidays."

Here's the video:



Now, even discounting the fact that Olbermann is attacking Buttars in part because the senator is playing into the "War on Christmas" horse-manure championed by Olbermann's arch-nemesis Bill O'Reilly, the "World's Worst" honor still doesn't make Buttars - or Utah - look good.

Labels: government, politics, religion

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

The Supreme Court of the United States will today listen to arguments about displaying religious monuments in public places - with a Utah case under the microscope.

The high court will hear about the dispute over Summum, the Salt Lake City-based spiritual group that wanted to erect a monument listing its Seven Aphorisms in a Pleasant Grove park where a Ten Commandments monument now stands.

Fun fact: Many of the Ten Commandments monuments placed around the United States were put there by the Fraternal Order of Eagles during the 1950s - a program that really took off when filmmaker Cecil B. deMille, promoting his 1956 epic "The Ten Commandments," arranged to have hundreds of the monuments installed. (There are nine in Utah.)

Maybe the Summum folks should hire Steven Spielberg to make an epic movie about their Seven Aphorisms.

Labels: religion