The anti-Christmas lunacy that has been sweeping the nation has made its latest stop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Wilson and Davis libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill have for years been adorned with Christmas trees. But thanks to the associate provost of university libraries, Sarah Michalak, that tradition is about to be broken – you guessed it, all in the name of tolerance. Who was it that said the provost of university libraries doesn’t do important things!?

Michalak is claiming that her decision is based on several years’ worth of complaints made by people who were offended by the Christmas display. In other words, the Christophobic bigots that have made UNC-CH their home have pestered Michalak into removing the tree. They made life just hard enough for her to capitulate and order the removal of a simple Christmas tree.

There’s only one way to deal with university administrators like Michalak who make decisions based on convenience, not principle. We need to make things very inconvenient for them when they act in unprincipled ways. That’s why I sent Michalak a fax and email this morning saying “Christophobia is a Social Disease.” And I’m asking the hundreds of thousands of people who will read this column today to do the same with the following information:

Fax: 919-843-8936
Email: smichala@email.unc.edu

Michalak told The Charlotte Observer that getting rid of the Christmas tree was not an easy decision. So she asked for moral guidance from Duke University – a school that hired a transvestite to stick a sparkler in his rectum while singing the “Star Spangled Banner.” She found out that Duke didn’t have a Christmas tree. Maybe they couldn’t afford one after paying legal judgments to several students falsely characterized as rapists by dozens of tenured professors.

Associate Provost Michalak was quoted by the Observer as saying “libraries are places where information from all corners of the world and all belief systems is offered without judgment. Displaying one particular religion's symbols is antithetical to that philosophy.”

This is as dumb a statement as I have heard in the last two days, which, by the way, was the last time I was in my office in the UNC system. Most people would assume that there is an easy remedy to the problem of a library representing only one belief system when one is supposed to represent many:  The library can just add more belief systems.

But Michalak tells the Observer the following: “We strive in our collection to have a wide variety of ideas. It doesn't seem right to celebrate one particular set of customs.” In other words, for Michalak, there is an easy remedy to the problem of representing only one belief system when one is supposed to represent many: Add even less belief systems until you don’t represent any!

Michalak was asked by the Observer the number of university library employees who had complained over the few years since she took the position at UNC. She said it was “at least a dozen.”

Maybe Associate Provost Michalak, with all her degrees and the authority of her position fails to understand a simple truth: She works for the taxpayers of North Carolina. And so do her religiously bigoted underlings.

As a North Carolina taxpayer, I’m tired of funding an assault on my own religious values by paying the university salaries of people not capable of solving real problems in the real world. So I hope you’ll join me in sending twelve faxes and emails a day until Michalak decides that life won’t be easy as long as she sides with those who oppose true religious freedom and tolerance.

Some may hesitate to send a fax or email citing objections rooted in the notion of Separation of Church and State. But those objections must be viewed in light of the UNC decision to assign a Muslim prayer book to freshmen less than a year after the 911 attacks. The students were not allowed to choose a prayer book from a list of “all belief systems.” They were only allowed to “celebrate one particular set of customs.”

Students read the Muslim prayer book, which was meant to teach them that Islam is a “religion of peace” – of course, this was done by editing out all the portions about killing Christians and Jews. A couple of years later, a Muslim student attempted to murder numerous “infidels” by driving his SUV through the “pit” – a popular gathering place in the middle of the UNC campus.

The Muslim male who tried to kill his fellow students later admitted that he was motivated by religious bigotry. It’s time for UNC library employees to admit the same.