Nativity Naiveté
Silly us! We thought the “holiday display” issue that Sonoma City Councilman Aug Sebastiani had put on the agenda for the city council meeting last week was going to go nowhere. After all, hadn’t the local ministers agreed two decades ago that Christmas scenes would no longer be placed on the Plaza?
Apparently, we underestimated the open-mindedness of the council. Yes, this question might be a “wedge issue,” one that could stir up controversy, and the other council members seemed uncomfortable that Sebastiani had brought it forward. But he made a principled case for allowing such public expressions in the Plaza, and the council, to its credit, was unafraid to deal with the issue on its merits.
We were struck by the observation of former community services commissioner John Kelly that the council had already approved a recent month-long display of public art on the Plaza. He suggested that art is intended to move the observer’s spirit in some way and that a crèche is, in essence, public art. While Mayor Stanley Cohen believed there was a clear distinction, Kelly’s point was well-taken that the council could not make that distinction if it is truly committed to “content-neutral” decisions about art.
Council member Ken Brown, echoing a public comment that we already have Christmas as a government holiday, noted that Santa arrives on a city fire truck every year and that the city decorates the big evergreen in the Plaza as a Christmas tree every year. Those things are not bad, reflecting a message of hope and love, so long as the rights of others to believe otherwise and to celebrate their beliefs publicly are respected.
We found irrelevant the results of a recent poll that 72% of the respondents want the crèche to return to the Plaza. The majority is not, by definition, correct. In the U.S., uniquely so, individual rights are protected by law, regardless of the desires of the majority. That is, people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that no majority can vote away.
For us, it is important to realize that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in order to protect religion from government, not the other way around. The price for freedom of speech is the risk of offense, but allowing use of the Plaza for free speech, religious or otherwise, is good government.
Going Back … Not
Some of us went back to high school last week, on parents’ night, and as usual we wanted to stay. Compared with the pressures of home and work and family, high school seems like a simple life – the goals seem clear, the teachers seem inspiring and the material seems interesting.
In our own conceit, we fancy that it’d be easy, now, knowing what we’ve learned in the several decades since our own high school years. But in all probability, we’d make the same mistakes all over again.
It was those mistakes that taught us what strengths we had, as individuals, and what weaknesses. In order to fit in, we learned how to mitigate one and compensate for the other. We also learned, if we were willing to take the risk of standing out, how to emphasize those strengths, be they academic, aesthetic, or athletic.
Those were necessary lessons about life and, really, once through was enough.
