A parent has complained that her child's primary school Christmas - pardon me, Winter concert contained a reference to Christmas.

"Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer"???

Gimme a flippin' BREAK, here.

There are so many things wrong with this issue that I don't even know where to begin.

For one thing, "Rudolph" is a secular song from start to finish. Evidently this mother is some sort of literalist extremist to want to suppress a word in her child's school.

For another, this is a public school. It's culture is ostensibly supposed to represent the culture of the community it represents. Okay, this doesn't happen so very much since schools became objects of centralized, rather than community, governance, but the basic premise remains:

This is a predominately Christian part of the world - even if sometimes it feels as if that Christianity is only nominal. WHY are we letting minorities of one, or three, demand that we abandon our identity as Christians because it offends them.

After all, Christianity is the root and foundation of the culture they are so richly enjoying benefits of, from the safety of their homes to the abundance in our stores.

Give credit where it is due. Acknowledge that other people have rights, too.

Contrast this woman to the Muslim I met a few weeks ago. He is from East Africa, a nation now identified as nearly 100% Muslim. When he was a child, however, that was not the case, and he was educated in a Catholic school. Although he was exempted from catechism class, he was not spared the saturation of the Catholic identity which shaped every facet of school life. He was taught by nuns!

And he told me, grinning broadly, that it was a wonderful education, a wonderful experience. He's still a Muslim, and a devout one (if a "moderate" one by current standards) - but he knows a lot about Catholicism, and he has great respect and affection for Catholic Christianity, because he absorbed it in that microcosm of Catholic life: the Catholic School.

If minority parents want their children to be spared the influence of the predominate cultural identity, they should either send their children to their own schools, or homeschool.

I wish Christian parents would rise up in protest of this hijacking, this sabotage of our culture. I'm pretty sure it will not happen, however.