Conservatives "reclaiming" Xmas leads to hate mail: "Go live in Israel!" [View All]

Last week, the Alliance Defense Fund -- a Christian legal group founded by conservative minister James Dobson -- posted on its Web site a letter and news release warning the Jackson County, Ga., schools to lay off Christmas.

The group said it had learned that the 6,000-student district northeast of Atlanta prohibited teachers from wearing angel pins, banned references to a ``Christmas'' party, removed some Christmas songs from a concert, took the word ``God'' out of another song, prohibited classroom Bibles and art with angels or Nativity scenes, and banned the greeting ``Merry Christmas.''

The Christian law group offered to educate the school system about religious rights. But senior counsel David Cortman warned, ``When necessary, we litigate these issues.''

Within 24 hours, Superintendent Andy Byars had digested the faxed letter -- along with a small flood of incensed e-mail from around the Internet denouncing, sometimes in offensive terms, his schools.

``You are either bigoted Jews who hate Christians or mindless secularists,'' noted one anonymous e-mail. ``Go live in Israel.''

Byars' head was spinning because, he said, almost none of the claims represented district policy.....

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