At a public elementary school in California, the Parent-Teacher Association organized a Christmas-tree lighting; a Jewish parent then asked if she could bring a six-foot inflatable menorah to be positioned alongside the tree. The principal demurred and the issue soon wound up in a federal court, which ruled—based on a 1989 Supreme Court decision—that the school could display the tree, which is a secular symbol, but may not display the menorah, a specifically religious symbol, lest it violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause. Michael A. Helfand examines this counterintuitive finding:
Establishment-clause cases often function as a Rorschach test. But, at a minimum, there are good reasons to question the district court’s importation of a line from the Supreme Court’s 1989 opinion. In that case, County of Allegheny v. ACLU, the Supreme Court addressed multiple religious displays erected in Pittsburgh. One of the displays, set in front of a local government building, included a 45-foot Christmas tree, an 18-foot menorah, and a “salute to liberty sign” with the mayor’s name on it.
In the contemporary case, the Carmel River School sought to exclude, as opposed to include, the menorah in its display. So while some might not normally think of a Christmas tree as a religious symbol, that view might change when government officials prohibit the inclusion of a menorah by its side.
Under those circumstances, you might start to wonder whether the display has started to take on a narrower religious meaning. . . . In this way, the district court’s attempt to pluck a sentence from a 1989 Supreme Court opinion, drop it into a present-day dispute, and then call it a day may not be the most thorough and thoughtful way to deal with the case before it.
And yet, it’s hard not to end with the following relatively straightforward point. Notwithstanding all these contextual niceties and jurisprudential trends, it would be nice to think that—as we desperately seek ways to join together after so long apart—schools could find ways to make sure their students and their families all feel included in communal gatherings. After all we’ve been through, is it really so hard to make space for a 6-foot inflatable menorah?
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/opinion/479550/is-a-christmas-tree-or-menorah-a-religious-symbol/