So Wal-Mart and other big chains are saying, "Everyone can decorate their locations
except for those in small town Ontario?"
I provided pictures of Walmarts that were decorated this Christmas. You could have provided pictures of yours at any time, but chose not to. I therefore took you at your word that your local Walmart was undecorated, but that doesn't mean I have to buy into your assumption that that means most other Walmarts are undecorated as well without a shred of evidence to that effect.
Regardless, even if most Walmarts being undecorated was true, and I don't believe it is; how you make the leap from that to there being some widespread attempt to marginalize or attack Christmas is beyond me. You provided nothing to back up your assertion besides appeals to emotionalism and glamorized beer goggle visions of the past.
Besides which, I find choosing Walmart to make your stand on companies with an agenda against Christmas to be especially laughable given the company's well-known Christian founder and alleged Christian operating principles:
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Such anger perplexes other Christians who think of Wal-Mart as a family-friendly place and a company founded on the biblical values of respect, service, and sacrifice. Founder Sam Walton's autobiography indicates he taught Sunday school in his church, prayed with his children, and had a strong sense of calling to better people's lives. With the Protestant values of respect for the individual, thrift, and hard work, Walton was eager to improve customers' living standards through low prices.
"Is Wal-Mart a Christian company? No," said former Wal-Mart executive Don Soderquist at a recent prayer breakfast. "But the basis of our decisions was the values of Scripture."
Indeed, based in the Bible Belt town of Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart has a tradition of tailoring its service to churchgoing customers. It sells only the sanitized versions of hip-hop cds bearing warnings of objectionable content. Responding to a campaign by the largest evangelical mutual fund group, The Timothy Plan, to keep Cosmopolitan magazine covers out of view of Wal-Mart customers, the company slapped plastic sheathes over suggestive women's periodicals and banned "lad mags" such as Maxim.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/may/17.40.html
"We feel that as a Christian Company it was inappropriate to carry things associated with morally corrupt themes..." (in this case purple ribbons for Mardi Gras)
http://consumerist.com/2006/03/walmart-refuses-to-sell-sinful-purple-ribbon-man-claims.html
Kingdom Ventures, Inc. (OTCBB:KDMV), a rapidly growing church development company, announced today that it has approved Costco (Nasdaq:COST) and Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) as Christian merchants, a prerequisite for joining the company's Christian Merchants program.
http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/product-management/5713027-1.html
The connection, she said, is largely the product of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who started the discount retail chain in Arkansas in 1962, and gradually tapped into the strong fundamentalist Christian culture across the Sun Belt.
Moreton, assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Georgia, said Walton worked into the company’s corporate structure the notion of “service leadership” that ties worker roles into the concept that “Christ was a servant leader,” and emphasizes the importance in Christian tradition of serving others.
With this vision, said Moreton, men at the company “earned their power through their superior ability to serve,” while women had “an enthusiastic audience for labor that was formally considered unskilled.”
Even an ongoing sex-discrimination case against Walmart illustrated the strong religious connection many of its employees associate with the company. Many of the plaintiffs in Dukes v. Walmart Stores Inc., a class-action discrimination suit filed in 2000 that alleged that the firm offered women fewer promotions and lower pay than men, admitted to an initial strong attraction to Walmart’s “values.”
According to Moreton, citing a story on the suit that appeared in The Nation, the plaintiffs’ “original enthusiasm for their jobs had much to do with Walmart’s reputation as a pro-family, Christian company.”
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/11/god-and-walmart/
No one likes what I've said or seen with my on eyes then goody for you. You're content with things as they are then goody for you.
I didn't deny what you saw with your own eyes, I denied the ridiculous conclusions about an agenda against Christmas that you drew from what you saw.
Forgive me for remembering a better time and simply sharing what I've observed.
As long as you keep in mind that it wasn't a better time for everyone, namely women, minorities, gays, the disabled, and non-Christians (or even Christians Protestants didn't care for, like Catholics) amongst others.
It is only OK to be snarky if you agree with one certain viewpoint. If you disagree or try to present a reasoned debate... now you are just asking for a snarky remark.
This has been explained to you about four times already, but bigoted remarks don't get a free pass just because they're "snarky." There's nothing hypocritical about criticizing one and not criticizing another that isn't bigoted. I know that might be a bit much to deal with when you live in a world with no shades of gray and all things being equal regardless of intent, but that's how the real world works.
I hope you're not considering what you've done as "presenting a reasoned debate," because all you did was cop an attitude and a persecution complex, complain about non-existent hypocrisy, and toss in an insane and loaded Ben Stein article while adding nothing more to it than "I agree."
- When she was around 4 or 5, while at the county fair, she wiggled her hand out of mine and disappeared into a large crowd of people. I enlisted a couple of sheriff's deputies to help me search for her. When I found her I grabbed her by the hand and with the other hand warmed her bottom.
- I looked at the deputies and said, "I suppose I'll be arrested for child abuse now?"
- One of them said, "Arrest you? I'd do the same thing!" He had children the same age as mine. We became friends... we still are.
Case in point, from your own words to the deputies. You frequently develop a persecution complex without justification and make assumptions about people without even letting them get so much as a word in edgewise first.
) whenever the opportunity presents itself. A small example of what it is like when someone inflicts undesired contact and pain on them (no, not by punching them in the nuts
) is frequently enough to deter behavior like that, because they will learn empathy, consequences, or both.
