As long as there have been people around to notice the change of seasons, people have celebrated spring holidays. It's easy to see why; it's a time of rebirth, an end of winter which was historically a time of hunger, illness, and death for most people. Today, in the United States, we mostly celebrate Easter, a holiday of enormous cultural and religious significance to a great majority of Americans.
Of course, various public officials have been trying to, effectively, de-religion every aspect of life in the United States, and Easter is sure to be on that target list.
As evidence, I offer an opinion piece by Washington Examiner contributor Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax County, Virginia mother, author, and Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women's Network, in which she describes how the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has now designated Easter Sunday as "Transgender Visibility Day." Yes, really.
Last week, Democrats on Fairfax County‘s board of supervisors voted to designate Easter Sunday as Transgender Visibility Day. The proclamation goes far beyond the supposed intent of making transgender people and gender ideology activists feel seen. Members of the board are also sending a message to Christians that they do not matter as they turn one of their holiest days into a celebration of an ideology that undermines the church’s core convictions.
Ironically, Chairman Jeff McKay, a Democrat, paid lip service to the importance of advocating all constituents when the board passed the resolution. He said, “As an elected official, it should be our moral responsibility to stand up for all people that we represent, not just the people we like or the people we agree with.”
If McKay and other members of the board were serious about their stated commitment to representing constituents, there are many other days they could have designated as Transgender Visibility Day.
Over 300 of them, in fact, once you strike off the list a bunch of other holidays that would be equally offensive to have the board hijack, like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and so on. There's no good reason to purposely designate Easter Sunday as "Transgender Visibility Day," unless the intent was to offend Christians. These people were sending a very clear message here, and it has nothing to do with "transgender visibility," which ostensibly recognizes people who make up less than 1 percent of the population, and who are already visible far out of proportion to their numbers.
That message? "You Christians and your holidays are not welcome here."
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Full disclosure: I'm not a Christian. One might think that I don't really have a dog in this fight. But I do. Any act of such cynical, deliberate intolerance affects all of us. This is an inexcusable act of exclusion of a community that represents the majority of Americans, of all shapes, sizes, and colors, from across the political spectrum. It was done deliberately, an act of codified intolerance by elected officials of the Fairfax County government.
This isn't the first such act by this board.
Fairfax County Public Schools’ policies align with the board’s resolutions. For the last few years, Fairfax County’s students have been inundated with surveys at the beginning of the school year questioning them about their pronouns and gender identity. Many of the county’s classrooms are decorated with transgender flags. After mandating preferred pronouns, district officials are also pushing to include gender identity lessons in the family life education curriculum beginning in fourth grade. How much more “visible” does a group need to be?
One can’t help but feel that Fairfax County officials’ timing was deliberate. In fact, this is not the first time that Democratic-endorsed local officials have attacked Easter in Fairfax County. In past years, Fairfax County Public Schools’ spring break has traditionally coincided with the Easter holiday. But in 2021, the school board made many politically loaded changes to the district’s calendar that included the intentional “decoupling” of spring break from Easter. It was not only inappropriate but logistically problematic for many reasons, and it had to reverse the decision.
It is the job of these elected officials to represent all of the people in Fairfax County. The board has no business deliberately - yes, there is no way this is not deliberate - trying to offend and insult a large part of its community. It's an outrage, and I share the outrage of every Christian who is rightly angry about having an important religious holiday hijacked in such a calculated, cynical, and deliberately offensive fashion.
There's also the damage it is doing to Fairfax County children with all this crap.
Fairfax County is, of course, a Democrat stronghold. In any just world, we would be looking for this entire board of supervisors to be handed their walking papers in the next election cycle. But, this being a Democrat stronghold, I wouldn't bet the farm on it, and that's too bad. But we can all look to our locales - our county boards, or whatever your local equivalent may be - and to the school boards, local judges, city councils, and so on. Local government, unlike the national government, is close enough to us all for the regular person to have an effect. Pay attention. If you have kids in school, go to school board meetings. Go to any local public meeting. Get involved. That's the only way overstepping petty officials like this will be rightly sent to find some other way to be nasty, offensive busybodies.
That's how we fix this, folks.
