Lowell Ponte
Saturday, June 3, 2006

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The purge of everything Judeo-Christian from America's public square advanced one more step on May 30. The Kentucky State Board of Education held another public hearing about its plan to change the way dates are to be written in school textbooks.

To increase the separation between church and state, the board voted that the Christian-based calendar designations B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, "in the year of our Lord") have appended to them the "neutral" abbreviations B.C.E ("Before the Common Era") and C.E. (the "Common Era").

If this recommendation passes a public hearing process, future Kentucky textbooks will teach that Columbus reached America in "1492 A.D./C.E." This more politically correct approach is supposed to be more "inclusive" of non-Christian students.

"I could not vote for the deletion of one or the other," said board member Hilma Prather. "I would like the inclusion of both."

What the School Board either overlooked or never considered is that this "Common Era" is also based on the presumed date of Jesus' birth. He remains its starting point. Its enumeration of years by Pope Gregory in the Gregorian calendar therefore is a "Christian" date regardless of the letters tacked on after the number. (The Eastern Orthodox church retains the older Julian calendar, which lags behind the Gregorian by approximately 13 days.)

Ecumenically, we could give "equal time" to other calendars. The "Common Era" year we number 2006 began partway through year 5766 in the Jewish calendar, in which Columbus reached the New World around the year 5252.

The year 2006 in our calendar began as year 1426 in the Islamic calendar, 1384 in the Persian/Iranian calendar, 2550 in the Buddhist calendar and 1927 in the Indian Civil Calendar.

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While we celebrated New Year's Day 2006, that same day in the Aztec calendar was "Tochtli, Atl, Cuauhtli." In the Mayan Long Calendar it was "12.19.12.16.14," sometimes also numbered 5125. By month's end the Chinese calendar's 60-year cycle of 12 animals ushered in another "Year of the Dog."

Our last New Year's Day happened in the Old Roman (Ab urbe condita, "from the founding of the city of Rome") calendar year 2759, in the Ancient Babylonian year 2755, and in the First Egyptian calendar year 6244.

Is it possible to create a politically correct calendar? Whenever a government, religion or culture designates what year it is, the resulting calendar will be a kind of monument in time to them.

The radicals of the French Revolution, eager to make an entirely new society and utopian new world, mandated an environmentally defined calendar purged of references to past dieties or cultures. Their new revolutionary calendar marked its Year One beginning on the autumnal equinox, September 22, 1792. Its 12 months carried names such as Brumaire ("fog"), Thermidor ("hot"), Fructidor ("fruit") and Vendemiaire ("Vintage month"). And each day of the year was designated by a specific flower, vegetable, tree, animal, mineral, tool or the like, such as beet, sulphur, dog, shovel or tuna. By that French Republican calendar, our 2006 is its year 214.

As a child I saw the calendar on the wall of our family kitchen as a time-keeping device, a sort of slow clock next to our electric clock. Only later did I recognize that the calendar is really a map. Each date is a place our planet comes to in its orbit around the sun, one orbit defining a year.

This is why we can anticipate annual meteor showers such as the August 10-12 Perseids. At certain places in Earth's orbit our planet splashes through rivers of stardust left in the crossing paths of ancient comets, bits of which come slamming into our atmosphere as shooting stars.

Our days are also defined by cycles, the rotation of our planet relative to the sun that produces each day and night. This happens approximately 365.25 times each year. Because these cycles do not divide evenly between years and days, the Gregorian calendar includes assorted adjustments such as leap years every four years, when February adds a day.

Calendars, as humankind's attempts to map and celebrate our place in the universe and to number our days, provide excellent teaching tools. But to impose new calendar labels in the name of political correctness will not separate church and state. It will separate person from person.

And what of Thomas Jefferson's private letter referring to a "wall" of separation between Church and State? My response to liberals who invoke this: If you will embrace the whole of Thomas Jefferson's views, I will agree with you.

Jefferson wanted church separated from state, but he wanted the state to be very, very small and confined by the chains of the Constitution to a distant tiny corner of the public square.

But today's "liberals" are really socialists pretending to be lovers of liberty. As the luminous P.J. O'Rourke rightly wrote, today's "liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink." The syllogism at the heart of liberalism's malignant mind is that the state must be and control everything. The state must control every inch of the public square.

And because church and state must be separate, and the state must be everywhere, liberal dogma demands that the church can be permitted nowhere. Not in a Christmas display in a city park. Not in the Bible a child might carry to school. And not in the cross atop a San Diego war memorial on government land. Every trace of faith competing with the pagan cult of Marxism must be expunged.

And now Kentucky's government finds it intolerably offensive to continue the traditional Christian dating of Western civilization in public school textbooks.

We could have a world where schools were all private and where government was shrunk to the puny size America's founders wanted. We then would have room for everybody's beliefs in a public square no longer dominated by self-important judges. Ever notice that politicians put tax day as far in the calendar as possible from Election Day to protect what they worship?

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