Jesus is back in Bakersfield:

At a contentious meeting Thursday, board members of one of the largest secondary-school districts in the state voted to change “winter recess” to “Christmas recess” and “spring recess” to “Easter recess.”

The decision was made amongst much controversy, including one protester setting fire to himself, which naturally attracted the most media attention.

The bigger issue, of course, is why the board decided to do this:

Officials of the 36,000-student Kern High School District said they were reclaiming terms that had been needlessly washed away by a tide of political correctness in the late 1980s.

Hmm. The thing is, there is nothing wrong with the terms “Winter” and “Spring.” The holiday breaks do have a foundation in the Christian holiday seasons (though most religious holidays do overlap), the terms “Winter” and “Spring” are accurate and sufficiently descriptive. There is no need to change the terms to overtly religious titles when those terms would necessarily exclude significant portions of the population. (I would not speak of offense, because everyone tends to be offended by something, no matter what.)

What is worrying to me is the use of being tired of “political correctness” as an excuse to inject religion into government-run public affairs. That is a highly disturbing precedent to set, and could be used to create any number of religious incursions that could then be used to excuse even more religion in government and mandatory public settings such as schools. Hey, let’s say that we’re tired of all this “political correctness” that says we can’t have “meditation” in classes–and hey, even “meditation” is part of that dirty, nasty “political correctness”! This is a Christian nation, after all, let’s get that out in the open, and have good, wholesome prayer in classes. It’ll be good for the kids.

And please, no “oh, that couldn’t happen here” response. It does happen here, and many people want to make it official and nationwide (and have for some time), or go further into religious instruction.

It seems pretty clear that the Bakersfield case is more one of religious advocates wanting to press their religious agenda and less one of being tired of some oppressive sense of fairness and neutrality–although I suppose that from a certain point of view, both of those could be seen as the same thing.