One week before the most solemn day in the Christian year, the city of Davenport, Iowa removed Good Friday from its municipal calendar, setting off a storm of complaints from Christians and union members whose contracts give them that day off.
Taking a recommendation by the Davenport Civil Rights Commission to change the holiday’s name to something more ecumenical, City Administrator Craig Malin sent a memo to municipal employees announcing Good Friday would officially be known as “Spring Holiday.”
“My phone has been ringing off the hook since Saturday,” said city council alderman Bill Edmond. “People are genuinely upset because this is nothing but political correctness run amok.”
Edmond said the city administrator made the change unilaterally and did not bring it to the council for a vote, a requirement for a change in policy.
“The city council didn’t know anything about the change. We were blind sided and now we’ve got to clean this mess up. How do you tell people the city renamed a 2,000 year old holiday?” said Edmond.
It didn’t take long for the city the resurrect the name Good Friday. Malin was overruled today and the words “Spring Holiday” disappeared.
Good Friday commemorates the day Jesus was crucified and died. Christians celebrate his resurrection the following Sunday, Easter.
The Civil Rights Commission said it recommended changing the name to better reflect the city’s diversity and maintain a separation of church and state when it came to official municipal holidays.
“We merely made a recommendation that the name be changed to something other than Good Friday,” said Tim Hart, the commission’s chairman. “Our Constitution calls for separation of church and state. Davenport touts itself as a diverse city and given all the different types of religious and ethnic backgrounds we represent, we suggested the change.”
News of the change could not have come at more significant time in the Christian calendar. News of the name change spread through the town on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, becoming a topic of conversation at church services throughout Davenport.
“If you deny the idea of Good Friday then you have to deny Easter,” Monsignor Robert Schmidt told ABC affiliate WQAD.
Hart said the commission had no plans to change the name of Easter Sunday, because it fell on a weekend and government offices were already closed. The commission, he said, discussed changing Christmas, but decided enough other religions celebrate Christmas too. Hart, however, could not name one.
The religious right has attacked town governments that have removed public Christmas displays, calling such practices a “war on Christmas.”
City employees, beginning with local police, feared the name change would violate their union contracts with the city, which specifies Good Friday as an official municipal holiday. Employees that work city holidays are paid time and a half.
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Nothing…absolutely nothing, shocks me or surprises me anymore.
.
Filed under: Renaming 'Good Friday' |
The Old Adam Lives! 
“The religious right has attacked town governments that have removed public Christmas displays, calling such practices a ‘war on Christmas.'”
Really? ‘Attacked,’ have they? The “religious right?” “War?”
Just the tenor of these reports is enough to show that the lame-stream media are nothing but a bunch of out-and-out left-wing liberal hacks.
Now they are scheming to paint anyone who holds a conservative position on anything as some kind of a far-out, kooky zealot who is apt to go “jihadi” just as easily as a mid east terrorist.
Watch how far they go with their new branding iron, “Christian Militia.”
Jonathan,
You are right on the money, here.
The media hates Christianity and will marginilze it any way they can.
This is so stupid. Be glad you get the day off and – at the very least – pay homage to the tradition that got you that day-off in the first place!
Whinging PC eejits really get my goat sometimes. I shall be enjoying ‘Good Friday’ just as I enjoy ‘Christmas Day’ and every other holiday that is based on the West’s history of Christianity.
Please know that not all us ‘liberal leftists’ are supporters of this secular nomenclature fascism that seems to be creeping in. If anyone gets offended by the name of the holiday then that’s their problem.
I do agree that ‘Christian Militia’ can be the wrong term. ‘Domestic Terrorists’ should be applied when the group in question is plotting to kill law enforcement officers, right?
We don’t set aside Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Ramadan as official holidays for government workers, why Easter? We’re not a Christian nation, separation of church and state is important. Just my two cents.
We may not be a Christian nation, but the nation was founded by Christians on Christian prinicples* and therefore included recognition of Christian holidays for its Christian citizens. So why change it? A Muslim, Budhist, or a Rastafarian still gets the day off, no? What do they care about why they are getting the holiday? They don’t care. It is just the weak, snivelling, self-deprecating angst of PC liberals who want to change the name to placate their sense of social justice and inclusiveness.
*A popular motto of the American Revolution founding forefathers (yep, I said “forefathers” not “foremothers”) was “No King but King Jesus.”
*A popular motto of the American Revolution founding forefathers (yep, I said “forefathers” not “foremothers”) was “No King but King Jesus.”
Yes, “No King But King Jesus” was a popular motto in a revolution but not the American Revolution. It was the motto of The Fifth Monarchy Men in the British Civil War of the 17th century.
“The Fifth Monarchists”, writes B. S. Capp, the leading scholarly
authority on the group, “were a political and religious sect expecting
the immanent Kingdom of Christ on Earth, a theocratic regime in which
the saints would establish a godly discipline over the unregenerate
masses and prepare for the Second Coming”.
WARNING! Do not get historical ‘facts’ from revisionists like David Barton.
If you can find me credible citations where this motto appears, I will withdraw my challenge. A single letter from some obscure figure doesn’t count. If it was popular, it should have appeared in several places like handbills, newspapers, etc.
Source: Then Attorney General nominee, the Honorable John D. Ashcroft.
Jonathan,
Ashcroft may be your source but I’m looking for evidence that “No King but King Jesus” was a popular, even unpopular, motto of the American Revolution. Someone repeating misinformation isn’t the same as original sourcing.
When someone, Ashcroft or you, Jonathan, makes an assertion like that, it is incumbent on that person to account for the veracity of their assertion.
We are all prone to mistakes and intellectual laziness so due diligence is where it’s at when it comes to facts. Look stuff up. Fact check once in a while. It’s fun and I learn a lot when I do.
Peace.
Don’t know why my comment came up all italics. 2nd, 4th and 5th paragraphs are me. The other 2 are quotes. Just want to be clear.
Not sure who used which mottos in which wars…but I am sure that the desire to do away with God and make ourselves into our own little gods, IS the human condition, and IS why ‘Good Friday’ was necessary.
That He would love us so much (those that hate Him) to forgive us and die for us…truly is ‘Good’.
“…but I am sure that the desire to do away with God and make ourselves into our own little gods, IS the human condition,”
That would seem to fly in the face of the fact that the majority of the human race has found belief in gods (of one description or another) for most of recorded history, wouldn’t it?
If what you say were true, then Humanism would be a much bigger movement than it is, and would have been for a long, long time.
/2 cents
ExPatMatt,
Humanism IS a huge movement! Even in the church!
Belief in gods and not the True Living God, Christ Jesus, is just another sign of the lostness of humanity.
This is why He had to come, and die.
I thank God that He did come. He certainly didn’t have to. he could have just wiped us out and started over, or He could’ve just forgetten about the whole thing.
That’s missing the point Steve,
People who believe in gods (any gods) are making a statement that they believe there is a power higher than themselves who they are answerable to. Whether or not you think they have the ‘right’ God is irrelevant, your point was that the human condition was to do away with God and set ourselves up as gods and my point was that this isn’t borne out by the numbers of believers in gods compared to active Humanist/atheists.
Sure, you can play No True Scotsman and so everyone else has it wrong and is really being a humanist – but they don’t think so, do they?
My point is that man will gravitate to anything but the Living God.
Searching for whatever gods there may be, is just a sign of lostness.
I think that people, even those in the pews, are practical atheists for the most part.
Worrying, and trying to figure it all out and control everything on their own…myself included much of the time.
Trusting in mankind vs. trusting in God. That’s the humanism that I mean and it’s everywhere.
He certainly didn’t have to. he could have just wiped us out and started over
I thought legend had it, that’s what He did. Wasn’t that what the flood was all about? If He’d just created non sinners He wouldn’t have had to send His Son (which was really Him, sorta,right?) to satisfy His blood lust.
What you have to remember is that long before “political correctness” enabled American Christians to feel that longed for sense of faux-persecution, Christians were waging a war of their own on the original Spring and Winter Holidays.
Yes, and we captured more than a few pagans, and we even had the gall to coopt the name of their Easter holiday–and we’re not going to give any of it back. So there. 😉