<p>Over the past few days I’ve noticed that lots of people have their Christmas trees out at the curb for collection by the town. The town will send crews of men out with trucks and chippers, and will dispose of these using tax dollars. I was suddenly enraged at this obvious violation of the separation of church and state. Is anyone else upset about this?</p>
<p>You give honest, respectable, tax paying Americans a bad name.</p>
<p>And, also, I’d like you to find where in the constitution it guarantees the separation of church and state. In court, the constitution is what matters, good luck with that.</p>
<p>1 they don’t lose money-they make wood chips</p>
<p>2 i’m sure they would take away anyones tree if they had one</p>
<p>3 it is a service to the environment to make sure all the trees are being recycled and put to good use</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of anyone being offended by a recycling public service</p>
<p>Look. We have an OBVIOUS religious symbol being used by observant religious types. Why should my tax dollars go to having these stupid things carted off and ground up? We’re not talking about branches that have just fallen off of maple trees. We’re talking about the very essence of the Christmas holiday season–the Christmas Tree (tannenbaum, if you prefer). We wouldn’t allow one of these things to be erected on the town square, would we??? Why then, should the government be assisting in the observation of a religious holiday by using tax dollars to dispose of the damn things??? I don’t ask the town workers to come over and scrape off my sacrificial grill after one of my holidays.</p>
<p>Good point! I am going to insist that my town charge a disposal fee to cover the cost of pickup (or drop off at the dump) of “Holiday” trees. Sometimes the most egregious injustices go unnoitced. It becomes part of our culture and intitutionalized. If perceptive people don’t notice these things and protest how will we ever improve as a society?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I will be shopping for an artificial tree that I can disassemble and reuse every year, thus avoiding the disposal fee.</p>
<p>One of our responsibilities in society, like it or not, is to pay for things we do not participate in or necessarily endorse. My city pays a lot of money out for programs benefiting groups of the population I am not part of.</p>
<p>Our town, in fact, will not pick up Christmas trees unless they are chopped into the appropriate size for the yard waste bin (pieces must be no larger than 2’, etc.). The Boy Scouts run a pickup/mulch service.</p>
<p>Yeah. You can always count on the Boy Scouts to step on the secular message. Darn them.</p>
<p>“I don’t ask the town workers to come over and scrape off my sacrificial grill after one of my holidays.”</p>
<p>How many democrats can you fit on the contraption in a single session?</p>
<p>I don’t know about your area, but if I need to dispose of a tree [already cut, reasonable size ie no 300 year old giants] and give a phone call any time of the year, I can get it picked up. We’ve done it a few times this past summer with trees hit by lightning.</p>
<p>Likely, it’s automatically done after Christmas since the number of calls would otherwise be very high.</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>A christmas tree- driver my goodness but we are desperate</p>
<p>guess we shouldn’t recycle all those wine bottles from those Christian Weddings either</p>
<p>btw- the Christmas tree was not really Christian, kinda like Rudulph</p>
<p>guess it takes the ACLU to get at the truth and that bothers you</p>
<p>we can ask a president if he got a BJ, but can’t find out if you have been spied on illegally and it irks you cause you know it was wrong</p>
<p>so what do you do, go after the ACLU in a snide little way</p>
<p>I see right through it</p>
<p>Actually, I do have a legitimate gripe on this topic. A couple of years ago there was a heavy wet snowfall right around Christmas which broke off a decent sized branch of an evergreen tree in my yard. I thought it looked a lot like a Christmas tree and figured I would be clever and put it out by the street and have the crew pick it up when they came around to collect the trees. I was quite annoyed when they left it it lying there by the road and I had to take it to the dump myself. Couldn’t fool those guys! They knew it was no Christmas tree!</p>
<p>Gospy, if you haven’t figured it out by now, Driver is being facetious.</p>
<p>You ask “… I’d like you to find where in the constitution it guarantees the separation of church and state.”</p>
<p>The phrase “separation of church and state” is a kind of a short-hand for the establishment clause, which is right at the beginning of the First Amendment:</p>
<p>“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”</p>
<p>The ACLU has argued many cases where it perceived that a government favored the practice of one religion over another in violation of the establishment clause, and many other cases where it perceived that the government was prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Driver, Like Bill O’Reilly, likes to exercise his First Amendment right of free speech by expressing umbrage at the first set of cases, while ignoring the second set, and unfairly bearing false witness against the ACLU as being anti-religious.</p>
<p>As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, this is just one of the crosses I have to bear. I try respond to this sort of thing by turning the other cheek. If Driver or O’Reilly would repent of such sins, and ask my forgiveness as an ACLU member, I would grant that forgiveness, up to seventy plus seven times.</p>
<p>NJr–next time put a little tinsel on the branch. That’ll work.</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with a little satire, folks… let’s not take ourselves too seriously… 
</p>
<p>Great thing about satire is that you can respond with your own if you disagree with it.</p>
<p>Greybeard - </p>
<p>If you were a Christian, you would grant forgiveness even up to seventy TIMES seven. But don’t worry, I have met very few liberals who have ever read the Bible carefully.</p>
<p>The ‘wall of separation’ between Church and State language originally came from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Church. He was assuring them that the federal gov’t would not interfere with free religious expression, not the other way around.</p>
<p>The original premise was freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion.</p>
<p>we have recycling pick up and yard waste on alternate weeks- you can put brush- leaves etc into yard waste and it is recycled I expect that evergreen trees that people have had in their homes can be sent to the same purpose</p>
<p>The interesting thing about the establishment clause is that it says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof” Yet, somehow the courts have taken that and twisted it to imply that this restriction also applies to the states. Doesn’t the constitution also say something about all powers not expressly granted to the federal government are to be retained by the states? So, doesn’t this mean that if Utah wanted to declare Mormonism as their official religion that they should be allowed to do so?</p>