Still a-wassailing. I’ll return Monday with a fresh DJ. This piece was first published in 2004.
RALEIGH — Back in 1988, Jesse Jackson thought he would make a political point at Christmastime. To those critical of a rising rate of out-of-wedlock births, Jackson was dismissal and argued that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus weren’t middle-class. “I would remind them that Mary was an unwed mother engaged to an unemployed carpenter,” he said at a speech at Atlanta’s Emory University.
“The political leaders afforded them no house,” he continued, “[and] the office of the bureaucratic innkeeper said, `Get out, you got here late. You don’t have a pedigree or the money. You are not married, and Joseph does not have a job.’ And so they had the baby outdoors in the stable in the manger at night in the wintertime. Jesus was an at-risk baby who could have died from complications under poverty and occupation.”
After a decade, the political agenda had changed a bit. “Two thousand years ago,” said then-Vice President Al Gore in 1997, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” Hillary Clinton chimed for good measure a couple of years later with the proclamation that Christmas was the day Christians celebrated “the birth of a homeless child.”
I know, it’s sort of like shooting fish in a barrel to call attention to the rhetorical inanities of Jackson, Gore, and Clinton. Jackson, in particular, seems in retrospect to have chosen a poor topic (unwed motherhood, a trend he apparently thought wasn’t quite advanced enough). The problem is that these kinds of analogical crimes get committed each year, by many people who seem otherwise sensible, and untold numbers of readers or listeners get taken in by them. So just to clear the air, let’s review the available facts.
Mary and Joseph were not homeless. Joseph was not unemployed. They had been ordered by government to leave their home and journey to a strange town for the purposes of being taxed. The reason there was no room for them at the inn in Bethlehem was that there were so many other people being shoved around by oppressive tax-collectors. Being run privately and for profit, not by a “bureaucrat,” the establishment did allow the couple to bunk in the stable, presumably for a small fee.
Nor did Mary choose to bring a child into the world without a father. Jesus had two.
Nor should Christmas be confiscated by welfare statists and turned into a morality tale about the need for government handouts. The message of the season is that all are imperfect, all have sinned and need redemption, which tends to undercut the notion that some should think themselves justified in ruling over the private decisions of others. And the theme of the season is giving – an act that is morally meaningful because it assumes the presence of volition, the right and capability of a person to choose whether to help another. Coercive government is not charity, it is not loving, and it is not an example of “Christmas cheer.”
It’s more like that edict that sent Joseph and Mary trudging across the land to an unfamiliar place for the convenience of publicans. Next time you hear any twaddle about how Christmas signifies the need for housing subsidies or Medicaid expansion, just ask the twaddler why he’s shilling for Tiberius. Bet ya a fruitcake he won’t even know what you’re talking about.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.