Trees, gifts and songs – those are three essentials for many Christians celebrating Christmas.

For others, holiday traditions might include skiing, beaches or favorite movies.

One of the great things about America is that there is no one way to celebrate Christmas. An even greater thing about America is that we don’t have to celebrate at all.

Americans haven’t always had such freedom. And as the nation debates new laws and restrictions on religions, we would be wise to look back to appreciate the progression of religious liberty.

In places such as Massachusetts, where Puritans held the political power, it was once illegal to celebrate Christmas.

Puritans viewed the holiday as a pagan celebration that had no place in true Christian society. If you marked the holiday by singing, missing work or decorating your home, you might be arrested and fined. That was true through much of the 1600s and 1700s.

And it wasn’t just Christmas that could create problems.

Throughout colonial America, religious discrimination and intolerance were common.

That’s why people with the same religious beliefs tended to move and live in the same general areas. That gave immigrants a better chance of avoiding religious, social and economic bias for themselves and their families. It’s a migration pattern that still holds true today.

And it explains why in the 1700s, so many immigrant Quakers made their new home in Pennsylvania. And why many Catholic immigrants settled in Maryland.

Over time – as more immigrants arrived, as new religions formed and as Americans moved to new communities – religious freedom became a more compelling issue for many residents and their representative government.

It’s no coincidence that Virginia served as a model for American ideals of religious freedom. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were Virginians who championed the concept, arguing that every American had the right to worship – or not worship – as his conscience directed.

Madison, for example, used the discrimination and persecution suffered by Baptists at the hands of the majority Anglican church in Virginia to argue for Americans’ rights to religious liberty.

Jefferson and Madison’s proposals to separate church and state were not popular in circles that favored intertwined government and church. But in steps – some small and some large – the idea of religious freedom prevailed.

Not that changing the law will automatically change people’s hearts, which explains why discrimination against religious groups continues even today.

Some of the most virulent bias is practiced against non-Christian religions. Some politicians even claim that intolerance of non-Christians is acceptable because so many of our founding fathers were Christians.

Such arguments aren’t based on either the Constitution or rooted in Christian principles, which are best exemplified, perhaps, by the story of the Good Samaritan.

Tolerance, love and acceptance are not reserved only for those who look, pray and act like us, but for all we encounter.

In his 2015 visit to the United States, Pope Francis visited Philadelphia and paid homage to the nation’s tradition of religious liberty.

He asked the Catholic community there to accept those of other faiths. According to an article in Newsday, he asked them to “join their voices” against today’s authoritarian leaders who attempt to “suppress religious freedom … or use religion as a pretext for hatred and brutality.”

According to the article, he later invoked Philadelphia’s motto, lauding the people “of whatever religion, who have sought to serve the God of peace by building cities of brotherly love.”

In today’s hyped environment of victimhood, we tend to focus on the slights and imagined slights against our own religion.

But religious liberty requires that we step beyond demanding rights for ourselves. It requires us to demand religious freedom for those who don’t believe what we do. Unless and until we extend the same freedom of religion to those who are of different beliefs and faiths, none of us has religious liberty.

It is impossible to have true religious freedom only for Christians, or certain kinds of Christians. Bestowing Christians with superior rights based on a false historic interpretation is merely a device to hound those who are different and rationalize discrimination.

Madison understood that truth more than 200 years ago. Let’s pray today’s leaders are as enlightened.

 

Reporters make mistakes.

And good reporters are the first to admit that mistakes happen – even when reporters and their editors take steps to eliminate errors.

Recently, President Donald Trump demanded that the Washington Post fire a reporter who made a mistake. The reporter, David Weigel, used his personal Twitter account to post a picture from what he said was a Trump rally in Florida.

Weigel’s tweet included a picture of empty chairs, indicating a poor turnout for the event in Pensacola. The photo had been taken by someone else before the event started and did not accurately reflect the size of the crowd.

Other reporters told Weigel he was wrong. Weigel removed the post from Twitter and after being criticized by Trump in a tweet, apologized. He later explained that when he posted his initial tweet, he had misunderstood the timing of when the photo was taken.

Trump’s tweet demanding Weigel be fired was one of many through the day in which he railed against the media. At one point he described journalists as a stain on America.

I’ve never covered the White House, but I did spend more than 35 years reporting news and editing the work of other reporters, and I can tell you that, generally, reporters for the mainstream media are much more reliable than the people they cover.

In my experience, and the experience of most newspapers, most errors occur when reporters rely on inaccurate information from sources.

In most cases, these have no political angle. Examples of common mistakes include an organization that gives you the wrong date for an event, such as a crafts fair. Or someone provides a wrong telephone number to call. Or a coach or staff member misspells the name of a student who is part of a story.

When I worked at newspapers, we had written policies that we used to reduce the number of errors we made. Reporters and editors, for example, were told to check the calendar. If a crafts fair is scheduled for a Tuesday, it’s worth a call because usually those are weekend events.

We also checked phone numbers with which we weren’t familiar, using either online sources or calling the number to make sure they were correct.

Those are just a couple of examples from the long list of steps and checks we incorporated into our work. And although they helped, such rules couldn’t eliminate errors completely.

And I don’t mean to blame our sources for mistakes. It’s our job as journalists to track down and publish accurate information. That’s usually not the job of the people on whom we rely for information. (Although a small percentage of public relations people who do have that as their job are frightening in their disregard for accuracy.)

As journalists, we are trained to be careful with facts and cautious with assumptions, so I’m not sympathetic toward Weigel, even though the photo he published was not on an official work account and he admitted his error. He was sloppy; he failed to verify information before he passed it along to countless other people.

There’s way too much of that going on on social media.

Not just by Weigel, but by others, including President Trump, who just days earlier posted a fraudulent video from a hate group to rile up fear of Muslims and immigrants.

So if the president thinks people who post inaccurate pictures or information on social media should be fired, the list will be long. And he’ll need to be at the top.

Rather than demand mass firings, those interested in improving the accuracy of news media and social media could serve that aim by adopting habits and processes that help prevent misinformation from being disseminated further.

For journalists and others, that means checking information before spreading it, even if you think your assumptions are correct.

It means refusing to publish, share or pass along videos, pictures and other material if you cannot verify its origins or are unwilling to vouch for the original sources.

And it means owning up to our mistakes – and demanding that others to do the same.

 

 

As much as the Republican Party has changed over the last couple of years, the GOP’s love of tax cuts has been a constant.

But the record over 60 years shows that although cutting taxes may be the Republican thing to do, it’s not always the conservative thing to do.

Not when the cuts add more than a trillion dollars to the nation’s debt, and not when the cuts blow a billion-dollar hole in the state’s budget.

Claims that the tax cuts passed by Kansas five years ago or the spanking-new tax cuts being finalized by Congress are examples of conservatism ignore what used to be basic conservative values.

It wasn’t long ago that conservatives railed against increased government debt; now they are among the biggest cheerleaders for more debt. The pep squad includes the all-Republican Kansas congressional delegation: Senators Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran and Representatives Ron Estes, Roger Marshall, Lynn Jenkins and Kevin Yoder.

All of them praised tax plans approved by the House and Senate – and they did it knowing that the plans would add at least $1 trillion to the nation’s debt.

They cheered knowing that non-partisan analyses of the Senate plan show it will cost most middle-class workers more, once 10-year gimmicks for individual taxpayers end. And they cheered as they broke President Donald Trump’s promises regarding cutting Medicare and increasing the costs of health insurance.

Then, within days of approving the tax plan and its massive increase in the nation’s debt, many conservatives in Congress claimed they could not possibly approve a spending bill to keep the government operating into 2018. It would not be fiscally responsible, they said.

Consistency, it seems, is as out of fashion as conservatism.

It was different when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.

In 1953, Eisenhower was being pressured to cut taxes. At the time, the argument for tax cuts was much more persuasive than now. The top rate in 1953 was 92 percent – compared to the current 39.6 percent.

But Eisenhower resisted.

He hated taxes as much as any conservative – but he hated debt even more.

Working with Republicans and Democrats in Congress, he staved off tax cuts until the budget was balanced. He did this while also championing ambitious infrastructure projects and restraining defense spending. And he did not take an ax to spending on educational or social programs.

Some historians think Eisenhower’s strategy on defense and his opposition to tax cuts cost Republicans the White House in 1960, as John Kennedy promised to cut taxes and spend a lot more on the military. Kennedy was elected and did both, creating bigger budget deficits.

There are lots of opinions about what Kennedy’s tax cuts did – and didn’t do. Most honest economists will tell you that it’s hard to isolate the cause and effect of one factor such as a tax cut with so many dynamic factors shaping a complex economy. It’s certainly misleading to compare recession-plagued years to growth years.

Legitimate arguments can be made that the 90 percent tax rate of the era was so onerous that cuts freed up money for the private sector, creating a significant boost to the economy. Using the same argument when tax rates are less than half that are less persuasive.

The Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, for example, were of limited economic value, at best. But they did contribute to massive growth in annual deficits and cumulative debt.

Given the muddled record, it’s not surprising Republicans revise history to support their claim that every tax cut creates more jobs and higher wages.

We see it in Kansas, as Gov. Sam Brownback and his supporters continue to claim that their tax cuts fueled economic growth. But virtually every measure shows the state lagged economically behind the nation and most of its neighbors, and that Kansas suffered chronic and staggering budget gaps.

Rather than learn from the record, our political leaders create fables that serve their political aims.

There’s nothing conservative about that, nor about running up debt or failing to properly fund government services. Even if politicians won’t recognize that truth, it’s time voters did.

 

Forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the best bargains in America are found at national parks. For modest entrance fees, Americans can spend hours or days experiencing some of the world’s most impressive sights.

But that likely will change.

Five years ago, you could load your family into an SUV and drive into Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain National Park or scores of other national parks for $25 or less.

A couple of years ago, fees increased by $10 to $20 at many national parks. Now, President Donald Trump wants to more than double those higher prices. At the nation’s 17 most popular parks, admission will be $70.

The Trump administration says increases are necessary to pay for a huge backlog of repair projects.

However, Trump plans to cut the national park budget by $296.6 million. And he wants to cut the number of park staff by more than 1,200, according to a report by National Public Radio.

Those reductions undercut claims from Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke that revenue generated by fee hikes will go toward needed repairs. The proposed fee hikes would raise about $70 million, which won’t offset even a quarter of the planned budget cuts.

What the enormous increases signal is a move toward making national parks pay for themselves through user fees – meaning marketing and business plans will focus on getting more money from wealthy tourists, while squeezing out middle and low-income Americans.

It’s true that there are amusement parks and resorts that are more expensive than national parks. Many people spend more than $70 to get into, for example, Disney World or to go skiing.

But Disney World and ski resorts are not public parks. They were not established by acts of Congress to preserve them from development. They do not, by law, operate for the benefit of all Americans.

“Americans already own these parks and they shouldn’t have to empty their wallets to enjoy them,” Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, told the Flathead Beacon. “Glacier and Yellowstone should be accessible to all of us. This decision will price Montana families out of our public lands, and hurt local economies, which thrive thanks to our national parks.”

Because the proposed increases come atop fee hikes made the past few years, arguments that park fees have not kept pace with inflation are inaccurate.

And as it has raised fees, the park service also has further limited access, saying more restrictions on vehicular access and other regulations are needed to manage the growing number of visitors and protect natural resources.

Officials are even proposing mandated reservations at parks such as Arches and Zion, both in Utah.

Costs also have been going up for lodging within national parks. Increasingly, renovations at hotels, cabins and other facilities have been used to justify higher rates.

As more Americans demand air conditioning, TV, cell service, wifi and upscale amenities, businesses that contract with the park service are meeting the demand – at higher and higher prices.

Contracts with the park service typically require concessionaires to offer a variety of price points to accommodate a variety of income levels. But if the government’s priority is to generate more revenue, Americans can expect contractors to market to the wealthy, with the government’s blessings.

As a business plan, it’s solid. The parks and the businesses within them could keep raising prices: for admission, for reservations, for transportation within the park, for guided hikes and tours, for lodging, for meals … and so on.

National parks are so popular with Americans and foreign tourists that they need not worry about pricing themselves out of business. The rich will continue to flock to Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and the other wonders that our nation has preserved.

As so many have pointed out, lots of resorts and amusement parks charge more than $100 entry fees.

Is that we want our parks to be? Resorts for wealthy Americans and rich international tourists?

Our national parks should remain accessible to virtually all Americans. They should not be turned into publicly owned playgrounds for the rich.

Visiting a national park isn’t comparable to visiting Disney World.

At least, it shouldn’t be.

•  •  •

You can find a copy of the plan and a link to comment on the proposed fee hikes at https://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?documentID=83652