Festivus: Seasons Greetings

Artist's impression.

This holiday season, as many as eight state capitols will be graced with a rainbow-festooned Festivus pole—a 6.5-foot-tall display crowned by a glittering disco ball. The pole was designed by Chaz Stevens, head of The Humanity Fund, a scrappy advocacy group that champions separation of church and state, free speech, and constitutional equality. Stevens hopes to place his display in Republican-dominated states—Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, Michigan—as a protest against what he views as their support for laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Several states quickly agreed to display Stevens’ pole, which was wise: As I explained in 2014, the First Amendment bars the government from allowing some groups from expressing their beliefs on state grounds while excluding others based on their viewpoint. Once states allowed Christians and Jews to erect mangers and menorahs in capitol halls, they were constitutionally required to let Stevens display his own expressive symbol...

Outward, Slate.

Seinfeld reference klaxon!

There follows a Q&A with Chaz Stevens...

In 2013, I got a tip saying, did you know there’s a manger up in Tallahassee in the capitol? So I write to Tallahassee, saying I want to put up a Festivus pole, thinking there’s no way in hell they’ll say yes. Three days later, they say yes. Up goes the pole...

Right around the corner, Kim Davis and her crazy people in Kentucky say, we’re not gonna give marriage licenses. That just drove me nuts. The very day that happened, I said to myself, those little fuckers! I am going to troll the living shit out of them. I’m going to wrap my pole in gay pride and put a disco ball on the top and stick it in the bowels of the Florida rotunda.

PS Somewhat spookily today's Independent republishes Christopher Hitchens' 2011 essay, The True Spirit of Christmas, which touches on this nonsense...

But what is all this clutter doing on the White House lawn or in the public rooms of the executive mansion, or on public property and in public schools? Quite apart from the clear stipulations of the First Amendment, this seems to me to violate the Tocquevillian principle that American religion is strictly based on the voluntary principle and neither requires nor deserves any taxpayer-funded endorsement. 

It also offends - by being so much in my face, without my having requested it and in spite of polite entreaties to desist – another celebrated precept about the right to be let alone. A manger on your lawn makes me yawn. A reindeer that strays from your lawn to mine is a nuisance at any time of year. Angels and menorahs on the White House lawn are an infraction of the Establishment Clause, which is as much designed to prevent religion from being corrupted by the state as it is to protect the public square from clerical encroachment...