MUSTANG, Okla. A superintendent's decision to remove a Nativity scene from an elementary school Christmas program has proven costly.

Angry voters in Mustang, Oklahoma, took out their frustration at the ballot box, defeating nearly eleven (m) million dollars in bond measures for the school district.

Some of the money would have paid for the construction of a new elementary school.

The superintendent says the decision was very difficult -- but adds that he was concerned about the separation of church and state.

Although the Nativity scene was removed, the children still got to sing "Silent Night."

Mustang, for those not familiar with beautiful Canadian County, is about 22 miles from here, a town of twelve square miles in a grid six miles wide by two miles deep. They were constant high school rivals, and are a relatively-isolated OKC "bedroom community" now. My piano tuner is from Mustang.

The article doesn't point out that some of the local establishment, so upset by the idea that public schools should not be hosting pageants where students were re-enacting Bible scenes, put on their own nativity scene on private property across the street from the school, just as the pageant let out.

When I heard that, I thought, "Good for them, because that's how it's supposed to work.. The school has a holiday celebration, and individual people or group piggy-back onto that using non-government resources to express their own faith. That's what the First Amendment is all about, baby.

But no, apparently Christianity is on such a weak footing in Mustang that unless the state forces the children to read the Bible, it will fade away, and parents are unable to take responsibility for the religious education of their own children. So they lashed out and voted to keep important money from their own school system, to punish it for not violating the US Constitution.

I would ask, rhetorically, what the good people of Mustang would do if some Islamic members of their community asked the school board to sponsor a Ramadan pageant, where non-Muslim students were expected to participate and attend regardless of their faith, because if that's unacceptable, then so is doing the same for Christianity. I won't ask this, because I believe the good people of Mustang can't even imagine Islamic members of their community. Mustang voted heavily for Sen. Jim Inhofe, the dangerous idiot who thinks the government should not interfere with any Jewish or Christian religious activity of any kind, but should still keep Muslim students from praying five times a day to Allah, or providing vegetarian meals to Buddhist students, because those aren't real religions.

As the months go by, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that here in the red states, the problem isn't that people are against religious freedom or plurality - it's that they're so overwhelmingly literalist fundamentalist Christians that they don't even understand there are other religions. To these folks, anything that's not Christianity or (sometimes) Judaism isn't a "real" religion, and shouldn't be treated as one. When you suggest that the government should treat both Hindu and Christian religions the same way, they lose it - they either reject or don't understand that both of those are "religions."

I think we're going to have to start by teaching people that even school sponsorship of one form of Christianity is a bad idea, and go from there to understanding other religions. It's an uphill battle because most of the people we're trying to reach aren't even aware of the discussion, though they should be. And the situation will not improve as long as communities like Mustang vote for fewer schools with fewer resources when those schools won't indoctrinate the kids in fundamentalism. Sigh.