(RepublicanJournal.org) – A Republican lawmaker has protested about a Christmas tree festival in his home state. A Wisconsin museum holds the annual event to celebrate the tradition of decorating trees, but this year they’ve allowed a SATANIC group to set up a tree. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) says it’s grossly offensive to Christians.
Every year since 2007, the National Railroad Museum in Ashwaubenon, a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, hosts a huge display of Christmas trees. This year it has 66 trees — and one of them was contributed by The Satanic Temple. It’s that tree that has Representative Gallagher outraged.
The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013 and headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts. Its founders admit they set it up to qualify for funding under the Bush administration’s faith-based partnerships program while being “repugnant” to Conservatives. Since then, it’s campaigned for a variety of leftist causes, using Satanic imagery to do it. The organization doesn’t believe in Satan as a supernatural figure and its goals are political.
Now the Wisconsin Christmas tree festival is displaying a Satanic tree. At first glance it doesn’t look all that different from a normal Christmas tree — until you realize the star on top is upside-down, and all the lights are red. There’s also a shiny green “serpent” coiled around the bottom and one of the decorations on the tree carries the slogan “Hail Santa,” a clear parody of “Hail Satan.”
Jacqueline Frank, the CEO of the museum, insists there’s nothing wrong with the tree. She says the museum is promoting diversity, and approved the tree because The Satanic Temple doesn’t promote violence. Gallagher isn’t buying that and says the tree is unacceptable. He told Fox News “It’s impossible to overstate how offensive this is to Christians” and compared it to taking a Hamas flag into a synagogue. He said it was enough to put him off taking his kids to the museum, and called it “a perfect example” of how Conservatives weren’t the ones promoting a culture war.
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