Let Us Remember the True Meaning of Thanksgiving Before It’s Abolished

This year as President Bush pardoned two turkeys, who surprisingly had nothing to do with the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s, he remarked that it was his “last Thanksgiving as President.” But it might be the last Thanksgiving any of us celebrate since there is a good chance that when Barack Obama takes over, he will abolish Thanksgiving along with other holidays liberals hate such as Columbus Day, Christmas and the Fourth of July.

Unfortunately, liberals have distorted the history and meaning of Thanksgiving because they see everything through the ideology of victimhood, which is a glass-half-empty view of history. Thanksgiving to liberals is a celebration of purported genocide against the Indians perpetrated by the Christian pilgrims. But in fact this is not what Thanksgiving is about at all. As usual liberals are ignoring the real victims here.

Thanksgiving celebrates the day that Pilgrims and Indians sat down to eat together before the gay secularist Indians divided this country and tried to foist their atheism and savage decadent culture on the God-fearing pilgrims. The pilgrims were rightly appalled by Native American culture where transgendered “two-spirit” people or “berdache” were accepted as normal members of the tribe. To Native Americans, who were ignorant of the Bible’s proscriptions against homosexuality and running around practically naked, there was nothing wrong with squaws marrying squaws and braves marrying braves. The pilgrims did not care what Indians did in the privacy of their own teepees, but they did not want their children exposed to this immorality. So the pilgrims were forced to defend themselves, just as Proposition 8 supporters, under assault from gay activists, must defend themselves now.

The idea that pilgrims defending their way of life committed genocide is a gross distortion of history, as Mona Charen and Michael Medved point out. “In the clash of civilizations between European settlers and Native Americans, millions died,” Charen writes. “But the overwhelming majority of those deaths were attributable to diseases carried involuntarily by Europeans and spread to natives who had no natural immunities to these pathogens. That is a tragedy, but not a crime.” Medved's new book The 10 Big Lies About America reveals the truth behind the "smears" that slavery was such a big deal or that genocide was committed against the Indians, which has ruined Thanksgiving for so many people. For example, he points out that the idea that Europeans had anything to do with willfully spreading disease through small pox-infected blankets is a myth. “The endlessly recycled charges of biological warfare rest solely on controversial interpretations of two unconnected and inconclusive incidents 74 years apart,” says the film critic, who screened hours of John Ford westerns to verify his findings. Sure, there may have been a few little massacres, such as the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre and Wounded Knee but most Indians died of diseases whose spread was no doubt hastened by their decadence and promiscuity.

Of course, it didn’t have to be that way. If the Native Americans had left the Europeans alone and stopped trying to foist their way of life on them there would be more Indian-operated casinos in America today. When we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are celebrating what America might have been if Indians hadn’t started the culture war that divides us to this day. Just as the Indians tried to foist their culture on the pilgrims, gays today are trying to force gay marriage on Christians and they seem surprised when Christians fight back to preserve their culture. If gays want to say they’re married that’s fine with me, just don’t force us to recognize it or give it legal standing. Then you are impinging on my rights.

Some gay conservatives, such as GayPatriotWest, understand that they should just be thankful for what they have. They have the freedom to practice whatever vile acts they want to practice behind closed, double-locked doors and we have the freedom not to have to know about it. As long as they don’t make the same mistake the Indians made, we can all live together in peace and harmony.

It’s no wonder that liberals hate Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a celebration of freedom. As GayPatriotWest points out “in practical, definable terms, the daily threats to my liberty are not being pushed by religious conservatives.” Our freedom is under assault in more important ways than whether the Mr. and Mr. GayPatriotWests of the world can register at Bloomingdale’s and visit each other in the hospital and file joint tax returns and not get evicted from their home or inherit money or property if one of them dies or be separated by deportation if one of them is an illegal alien. Liberals are trying to take away more important freedoms like the right to smoke in bars or eat trans fats or buy political influence or own assault rifles (which would have come in quite handy if settlers had had them to ward off Indian attacks).

So this Thanksgiving let us remember and celebrate a time when there was no culture war and gay secularist Indians and religious conservative pilgrims could sit down together and smoke a peace pipe without having to worry about anti-smoking laws and consume all the trans-fat-laden delicacies they wanted, with their guns and bows and arrows stashed under their seats just within reach.

Share This Post