My old Oxford College sent me an email just before Christmas wishing me happy holidays, festive break etc. It did not mention Christmas which, adopting the vernacular of the age, I told Hertford, caused me great offence. I pointed out that they may be Godless liberals but the reason they got time off work at this time of year was because it was Christmas, the time when many of us celebrate the birth of the Lord.
The word offence prompted an immediate grovelling apology as I knew it would as one merely needs to claim offence to get guilty white middle class liberals wetting their pants in terror. Hertford said that it had many students from overseas these days and did not want to offend them. I so wanted to say that the presumption that non whites were not Christian was a racist generalisation but settled for pointing out that my wife was of Indian origin and a devout Christian and left it at that.
At the University of Brighton, not one of our more ancient institutions of learning and the sort of place that one hopes is shut down as the Government’s finances come under greater strain, they went one stage further issuing a nine-page pamphlet to staff suggesting they do not use the term “Christmas” at all lest it offend.
Just under half of those living in Airstrip One identify as Christian but the vast majority of the rest are from that tradition and thus celebrate Christmas albeit in a consumerist and pagan way. Only 11.5% of us are Moslem, Hindu, Jewish, Jedi or other faiths. But guess what: quite a few of the 11.5% celebrate Christmas too.
Meanwhile c 3% of the population are LGBTQA+ and among the 97% who are not quite a few find the practice or idea of homosexuality genuinely repulsive or offensive. I stress that I do not but some folks do, including – according to surveys – more than half of the 6.5% of Brits who are Muslims. So I suggest to you that
a) more folks are offended by homosexuality than by Christmas
b) more folks are offended by homosexuality than are gay.
That is not so say that such regressive attitudes should be condoned for they should not be. But it is odd that in Brighton folks are commended not to mention Christmas merely on the grounds that it causes offense. Yet on any one of the 59 weeks a year which is Pride Week in Brighton, anyone who not only declines not to celebrate Pride but who opts not to actively display their support in a proactive sense will be slated for “causing offence”.
A loving God, as opposed to a totalitarian tinpot Marxist madrassa, gives us free will. We should be allowed to say Happy Christmas at a time when it is, without doubt, Christmas. At the same time we should be allowed to wear rainbow coloured ribbons, sock and underpants all year round or at no point in the year. That choice is God’s gift to us but for the grim liberal in 2022 it is not a choice we should be allowed to make. The excuse being what a offends a Guardian reading elitist liberal.