I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t groan and shift in my chair when I read the following first line from a transcript of a Chicago television news show broadcast yesterday: “A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a Muslim parent.”

I envisioned a schoolhouse renovation involving footbath facilities or a plan to excise the Holocaust from social studies class. The first of which is occurring on the university level in this country, and the second of which has occurred in England.

However, then came the next line: “But now, as CBS 2's Suzanne Le Mignot reports, other parents are angry that traditional school holidays will be renamed or even eliminated.”

Apparently the school district is 30 percent Arab American and things got confusing when a student wanted the school to put up Ramadan decorations. The superintendent decided to strike the set, as it were, and go with no religion in the school. Period.

Admirable, I think. After all, I’m a non-religious guy who happens to like religious holidays. I adore Christmas music and Seder plates, feasts and rituals, sales, decorations and days off. But the thing is I can’t deny my contempt for the confusion of church and state. And ultimately, I’m free to enjoy any of these things whether or not public schools call the last two weeks of the year Christmas break or winter holiday.

So what still bothered me?

For several years I’ve conducted a very unscientific study around Thanksgiving time. I ask every Muslim cabdriver I can if they celebrate Thanksgiving. I do this because I had read varying Imams’ opinions on the matter and wanted to look into it for myself. My anecdotal data shows a robust disinclination on the part of Muslim cabdrivers to carve turkey and eat stuffing. (For what it’s worth, and I think it is worth something, the few who told me they did celebrate thanksgiving were from Africa.)


So, I don’t know. Is the news out of Chicago evidence of people making the U.S. a greater nation or simply a more sharia-friendly one? It’s my concern for what Mark Steyn and others call creeping sharia. The process whereby liberal societies make special accommodations to Muslim residents so as not to offend them, and in so doing slowly make the liberal society less liberal.

Clearly in this case the wisdom exercised by the school superintendent doesn’t speak to creeping sharia. No special case was made. And, in fact, when the state rules on the side of the secular any movement toward sharia is necessarily stymied.

However, I’ll be very curious to see how Thanksgiving—a secular holiday in my book—fares in Illinois' Ridgeland School District 122 over the next few years.