Liberty Counsel, the Religious Right hate group, has once again released its annual “Naughty and Nice” list (a.k.a. the “Friend or Foe” list), telling Christians where they ought to shop over the winter.
The “Nice” list includes companies that promote Christmas (by name) and Jesus. The “Naughty” list includes the companies that say “Happy Holidays” because they allegedly censor Christmas… or at least fail to show enough Christmas cheer. The goal is to reward the companies that cater to Christians and actively ignore Jews, Muslims, atheists, and everyone else.
This year’s list is quite literally the exact same PDF file as last year, typos and all, with the sole exception being the year listed on the cover. Which makes sense since this group constantly recycles its cries of persecution.
On their “Naughty” list this year (like last year) are retailers like Barnes and Noble (which, we should note, sells bibles), Burlington Coat Factory (“severe lack of Christmas advertising with biblical meaning”), and The Gap (“Only ‘holiday’ is used to refer to the upcoming season”).
In short, those stores are the ones that acknowledge the existence of non-Christians in their holiday marketing campaigns and use language that’s inclusive of everybody, while the “Nice” stores are rewarded by Liberty Counsel for treating Christians as the special snowflakes they think they are.
As for Amazon, which is where a lot of people will make their holiday purchases, it’s not even on the list. But “Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland” — their capitalization, not mine — made the “Nice” list despite having a single location in Michigan.
So this is hardly some comprehensive list. It’s just regurgitated pettiness. And it lets the people at Liberty pretend they’ve saved Christmas. (No joke. That’s what their website says.)
(via Joe. My. God. Large portions of this article were published earlier because if they don’t have to change their wording, neither do I.)