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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: Neeka who wrote (147528)11/18/2005 8:01:31 AM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (1) of 793800
 
What you fail to address is that those offended Christians are just as powerful monetarily as the anti-merry Christmas crowd.

Yes, that's an interesting dimension. I didn't address it because it was irrelevant to my point, which was only to disabuse you of the notion that "majority" is relevant to this issue. And I'm disinclined to address it because I can only speculate from my experience in organizational policy making.

The instinct to switch from Merry Christmas to Happy Holidays is, IMO, natural and obvious for people in those decision making positions. Big institutions like government and corporations switched a long time ago. The instinct to try to include everyone rather than marginalizing some is one of those instincts common and essential to people of good will. It's part of humanity 101. People want to be nice or at least be thought of as nice so that's one of the values that they adopt if it doesn't come naturally. And even if they don't want to be thought of as nice, they have legal departments telling them to at least act nice in those arena where they are vulnerable.

My speculation is that it simply never occurred to people in those decision-making positions that there would be a backlash against something so basic and normal in their environments as being inclusive. I speculate that it never occurred to them that people who bill themselves as Christians could ever be so small and so nasty as to take offense at niceness and inclusiveness. But that has happened and they either don't know what to do with it or have decided that they are on safer ground sticking with niceness and inclusiveness.

What you fail to address is that those offended Christians are just as powerful monetarily as the anti-merry Christmas crowd.

I don't know if they're doing polls and studies. They probably should be. If they are, I doubt they are polling how many people prefer "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays" and going with the majority. It makes no business sense to do that. They may be polling to find out how many are so distressed by each of those phrases that they refuse to shop or have a diminished shopping urge. If they were to come up with a measure of the hypersensitive (anti Merry Christmas) vs. the nasty (anti Happy Holidays), I don't have a clue which would be larger. I would hope neither would amount to much. It's Christmas time, after all.
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