Davide's Notes

Sometimes, esp. when one has been living abroad for some time, one learns about what happens in his/her own native country quite indirectly. Jim West briefly blogged about a report by Spiegel Online on the removal of the name of Jesus from Christmas songs not to offend Muslim students in schools.

This seems to me just another dummy application of "laicist" dogmas. Here is another report (in Italian) on what happened. Reading this, it seems that it is not only songs that are deemed to offend sensibilities; the main devices that to date have been found to implement religious correctness and multi-ethnicity are the following:

• When singing Christmas songs in class, students have the option to replace "Jesus" with "virtue".
• More radical: no Christmas songs are to be sung at all.
• No crèches (presepe) in schools anymore (having crèches at Xmas as representation of the Holy Family is a tradition popularized by St Francis of Assisi in 1223; see for example this article)
• The traditional Nativity play (very common in primary schools) has been substituted in a school by Little Red Riding Hood (in Italian: Cappuccetto Rosso). I can imagine the dismay of a young student that had been selected to play Balthasar of Saba and all of a sudden has to play Poor Granny.

And, strange as it seems, I agree for once with that Northern League politician mentioned in the article, describing this as yet another form of racism.