Guys, “war on Christmas” is an annual tradition at this point. It’s largely a Potemkin village type deal too. You get one or two loudmouth assholes with media connections to place the seed crystal, the media dumps gasoline on the fire, and then outrage /about/ outrage gives the final burst of momentum. (Yes, those are mixed metaphors. Fuck you, it’s a free country, don’t tread on me.) I think Megyn (sic) Kelly was in charge of it last year, but she has her hands full with Trump this year. The red cup shit? Take a look at all the web-based news organizations that bother linking sources, and they all go back to a single Breitbart article (right-wing publication). That and Youtube personality Josh Feuerstein, who’s famous on the anti-fundie circles of the internet for being a daft, loudmouth fundie who says a lot of stupid shit, were the catalysts for this. They get around. It’s so damn easy to share things, and the media doesn’t have either the brains or the integrity to let shit like that go, so it turns into “aren’t these extremist nutjobs on a particular side of an ideological spectrum crazy? What if we assume these fuckwits are actually a sensible sample of a whole huge group of people? Then would you freak out about this and share this and give us site traffic?”
Some very daft people will inevitably say stupid shit. Some stupid people will inevitably agree with them. What they’re saying in particular isn’t important. The red cups are a red herring. The point isn’t whether their specific argument is valid, it’s about whether the point should be taken seriously at all. Engaging in the point is validating the conversation itself. When someone says something as goofy as “there’s a war on Christmas”, you shake your head, and either ignore them or tell them “dude, shut the fuck up”. If they want to follow it up with a specific point, nod condescendingly and then walk away. Winning an argument about cups is as useless as it sounds. The only people who actually think there’s a serious argument to be made are too stupid to be taken seriously. So there’s no victory in winning the argument.
Look, I’m not saying it’s not a fun conversation piece. “You hear some idiot says the cups at Starbucks are anti-Christian?” “Lol, wtf? People are stupid.” Fine. No objection to that. But resist the urge to pat yourself on the back publicly; it reinforces the spurious notion that there was ever a real debate to begin with. All but the dumbest of us know the answer to that question already. We’ve solved nothing of great significance. The schism between secular culture and religion, multiculturalism, or even religious beliefs as a whole are valid topics of contention, but we didn’t make any advances with this. The danger is we think we did. We all discharged a lot of psychic energy (libido in the original sense) and have nothing to show for it.