Perhaps of the decade. As Joe Mathews explains:

Today a brother and sister, David Joseph Hyatt and Merry Susan Hyatt (and yes, that’s how she spells her first name, and there’s no story behind it, she says), filed a ballot initiative at the attorney general’s office that is entitled, “Freedom to Present Christmas Music in Public School School Classrooms or Assemblies.”

Your blogger, who enjoys caroling and attended a junior high that required everyone to sing “Let There Peace On Earth” at the end of the holiday pageant, was unaware that Christmas music was under threat. If so, the people should rise to the occasion and defend it. “Each public elementary and second school shall provide opportunities to its pupils for listening to or performing Christmas music at an appropriate time of year,” says the measure. That may sound compulsory, but the initiative also requires schools to give parents three weeks’ notice of Christmas music, and to allow them to opt out of having their children be a part of it.

When I reached Merry Hyatt by phone in Redding this afternoon, she explained that at her previous school district in California (she’s a substitute teacher who lived in Riverside County but recently moved north), songs with specific Christmas content were barred from the holiday party. “We were having Christmas without Jesus,” she says, which was just silly. She was unaware of any specific law or rule prohibiting them, but “people were just guessing that they shouldn’t do it.”

Hyatt says she has no money to spend to actually qualify the initiative but that she’ll “have to go to the churches and do it for free,” a refreshingly honest statement of how socially conservative politics works these days in California.

Although one can be sure that Bill O’Reilly will be all over this initiative, the Hyatts have a more fundamental problem to deal with: the First Amendment and the Establishment Clause. As the ACLU points out:

These are difficult legal questions, and largely depend on the facts of the particular case. In general, schools cannot promote one religion over others. Singing songs, or making displays that encourage one religion would violate the Establishment Clause, so months of preparation for a Christmas pageant may not be permissible. However, schools are allowed to educate their students about various religions and engage in secular holiday traditions, so a production with multiple religious and secular songs or one that celebrates the holiday season without proselytizing may not violate the Establishment Clause.

I have to assume that a Holiday pageant that includes songs from multiple religious traditions won’t be enough for the Hyatts, who seem to be laboring under the delusion that this country and its public institutions exist to promote Christianity. Obviously they don’t, and I can fondly remember many holiday pageants from the 1980s that were entirely secular in nature that I nevertheless enjoyed about as much as a young boy who can’t carry a tune can.

Even though this initiative is probably not going anywhere, the success of Proposition 8 and in particular the California Supreme Court’s decision upholding it, particularly their embrace of the “anything goes” Starr Doctrine both suggest that we might see more of this crap in the future. And next time it might actually be well funded.

California’s constitution needs to be revised to prevent people from taking away the rights of others. One of those rights is to attend school without having religion imposed upon you. Even when the imposition takes the form of 6-year olds singing.