A Modest St. Paddy's Day Proposal by Kevin J. "Seamus" Hasson

Mar 17, 2009

This piece ran on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal Online.

Well, we've done it. We've managed to celebrate another St. Patrick's Day without any lawsuits by Anglophiles trying to enjoin Irish parades as ominous omens of ethnic cleansing to come. What's more, we again made it all the way through February—African American History Month—with no attempts by Euro-Americans to enjoin it as the first step down a long, slippery slope to apartheid.

Yes, of course, those are both preposterous ideas. And yes, of course, they'd both be laughed out of court. That's the whole point: they are no more preposterous than the annual December lawsuits over nativity scenes and menorahs, which deserve the same fate.

Just as government recognition of the ethnic elements of culture, like St. Patrick's Day, or the racial elements of culture, like African American History Month, portend neither ethnic cleansing nor apartheid, so too government recognition of the religious elements of culture does not pitch us toward another St. Bartholomew's Night. As Freud might have said, sometimes a Christmas tree is just a Christmas tree.

Not so fast, say the guardians of secularism. Religion is different. The First Amendment bars government religious preferences, but says nothing about government ethnic or racial ones. And that's true—as far as it goes. But the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause does bar those preferences, and measures them against the same legal standard as religious preferences—the compelling interest test.

So, why is it that parades celebrating Irish ethnicity and months celebrating racial minorities do not run afoul of that standard, while plastic mangers and menorahs do?

No good reason I can think of.

Ah, but the secularists say, religion is especially dangerous. Throughout history people have fought wars over it. Yes, indeed they have—elsewhere. Our civil war was fought over race and over political theory and economics, but (as Lincoln's Second Inaugural notes) not at all over religion. And while there are still places in the world where people do each other in over religion, there are far more where people kill each other over ethnicity or race.

The secularists' last-ditch argument is usually that ethnicity and race are not changeable features of human nature, the way they suppose religion to be. But that theory fundamentally misunderstands the nature of religious conscience. We do not choose our faiths the way we choose, say, our neckties or hair colors. Rather, in a very real sense, our faiths choose us, as our consciences demand that we embrace what seems to us to be transcendentally true. People do convert from one faith to another, but usually not lightly.

All facets of human nature naturally turn up as facets of human culture. Just try to imagine a culture without race, ethnicity, sex, love, death, art, music—or religion—in it. What would it look like? Why, it would look much like Pittsburgh in the 1990s, when they tried to step above the annual holiday fray and celebrate neither Christmas nor Hanukah, nor even Kwanzaa, but only something called "Sparkle Season." Or like Cleveland a couple years ago, when a local bureaucrat insisted with a straight face that the decorated evergreen the city had erected wasn't worth suing over because it was really only a "Pearl Harbor Day tree." Cultural enrichments? Hardly.

Authentic culture is only possible when it is the honest expression of who we really are. And we are not a people who celebrate sparkling for its own sake or mourn Pearl Harbor Day with trees full of candy canes. We are, rather, a people who revel in the contributions that our ethnic and racial heritages bring to our lives. And in the same way, we are a people who want to revel in the meaning that our transcendent truths give to our lives.

So, let's celebrate the day by raising a glass to those courts with the good sense not to be unnerved by neurotics ranting about St. Paddy's Day or African American History Month. And let's raise a second glass to a future December when the same courts will be similarly sanguine to secularists' ravings about religion in culture.

Click here to read the original piece.