Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Michigan City Gets It Right

Posted by Ed Brayton on November 22, 2006
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I’ve written before about the city of Berkley, Michigan and the controversy over their nativity display. Here’s a city who handled it exactly right, I think. The city council voted to turn the display over to a group of local clergy and it will now rotate among the churches in the city. It’s a perfect common sense solution. The creche still goes up, the citizens can still visit it and enjoy it, but it’s not on city property where it sends a message of exclusivity (if the city hall grounds were an open forum where all religious groups could put up a display, that would be different and would resolve the problem in another way).

And it seems to me that the Christians there should be happy with this as well. Keeping the creche on city property required adding in a bunch of secular symbols as well, watering down the religious significance of the display. I can’t imagine why they would prefer to do that and keep it on city property rather than have it on church property where they have no such restrictions. Naturally, STACLU is upset about it.

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Comments

  1. #1 Dave L
    November 22, 2006

    I’m a Berkley resident and I was pretty sure the city would come out on the good side of this issue. The local weekly rag had a recap of one of the original city council meetings where this issue arose, and I believe every quote from the church leaders in town was in favor of this, as Ed aptly put, ‘perfect common sense solution’. The churches actually seemed somewhat enthused about rotating the display; it increases the community between the different denominations and they thought, and I agree, that it would have more power and meaning on church grounds.

    The objections all seemed to be coming from one small group of citizens who I believe organized themselves into some kind of STACLU clone whose name/acronym escapes me. Makes me want to point them in the direction of several posts on this very website, not that I’d expect it do much good unfortunately.

  2. #2 Dave L
    November 22, 2006

    I meant to say that believing in God is obviously wishful thinking and only for idiots, and that atheists are all close-minded heartless poopie-heads. Jesus came to save us from not following the rules that he is damning us for in the first place, some miracles might be scientific, and any belief is irrational. Sorry if my previous post strayed off topic…