Terrace, BC, is the latest casualty in the war on Christmas that is raging in cities around the world. The rural town, located north of Vancouver, is using an often misinterpreted 2015 Supreme Court ruling to remove the beautiful nativity scene that had adorned the city hall for years.
“Of course we’re disappointed,” says Paul Vandermeer of the Catholic men’s charitable group the Knights of Columbus, which had put on the display without complaint for many years.
Supreme Court Scrooges
The 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling, based on a 2007 complaint about the City of Saguenay, Quebec, holding a prayer before the start of council meetings, was enacted by Terrace city staff and not the elected officials.
“The state’s duty to remain neutral on questions relating to religion cannot be reconciled with a benevolence that would allow it to adhere to a religious belief,” the Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous judgement.
“The need to separate religion and government has been the subject of numerous court decisions in Canada,” said City of Terrace spokesperson Tyler Clarke. “The decision was made by the Supreme Court of Canada, it wasn’t made by any single individual within the city. We’re simply following what the laws tell us.”
But Vandermeer disagrees on the interpretation of that ruling, saying that the judgement referred to prayer and not to symbols or displays.
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?
The past few weeks have seen a flurry of nativity scenes being removed around the globe, everywhere from Australia to Mexico. In fact, Mexico has contemplated removing religious scenes from all public spaces with the issue set to be heard by the country’s Supreme Court. Even a nativity scene in Vatican City, the center of the Catholic faith, was given a soulless post-modern makeover just a few years ago in an attempt to modernize the Christmas story.
“It’s fine if public spaces want to remove a nativity scene or any other religious interpretation, but under that same logic will they also remove a Pride flag?” an unnamed professor of theology from Ryerson… errrr …Toronto Metropolitan University tells Get Woke Up!
For Terrace BC, the misinterpretation of the Supreme Court ruling may snowball throughout Canada with more and more symbols removed and replaced in favour of fringe groups calling for change. The very word ‘Christmas’ is already being redacted in the change to the office “holiday party” to the “winter seasonal break” at schools. Many organizations and levels of government have defacto deemed the word Christmas something not to be uttered in public.
And some aren’t sure how far the woke left are willing to go. With some experts even speculating that in a few years Christmas Day may become no more than a sugar plum fever dream.
“Are we even talking about equality anymore?” asks our bible thumping TMU prof, “or are we talking about forbidding humanity the right to worship religious idols and instead forcing them to worship the state?”
Uhm, Happy Justin Trudeau Day?
