| A VERY ALDERDEN CHRISTMAS |
| By JOSHUA ZAFFOS | |
| Wednesday, 05 December 2007 | |
 John Wayne’s voice booms over the public address system, like that of the Ghost of Christmas Past: “I pledge allegiance to the flag…” the Duke recites from the great beyond. Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden, an unabashed Wayne-ophile dressed in a black cowboy hat, beams during the rendition on December 1, a chilly Saturday morning. His wife is dressed as Mrs. Claus and hands out candy canes during the tree-decorating party outside the sheriff’s office. ’Tis the season for Fort Collins to uncomfortably wrestle with public holiday displays. After the city council refused to support a publicly displayed menorah for Chanukah during the previous two winters, the elected officials appointed a citizens’ task force to review the city holiday-display policy this year. The group met ten times before drafting recommendations for displays of white lights among city-sponsored decorations and no indoor Christmas trees in city buildings. The members also proposed an educational exhibit at the Fort Collins Museum to include religious and nonreligious symbols of various winter celebrations. Local and national media quickly portrayed the recommendations as another volley fired in the War on Christmas, and the sheriff took a stand, as if he were Wayne in The Searchers, consumed with a quest for revenge. “The recommendations of the Holiday Display Task Force are clearly designed to suppress the thanksgiving and joyfulness of Christians for the birth of Jesus Christ,” Alderden wrote in his online Bull’s Eye newsletter. “Our country, and sadly our own community, has reached that point where people of faith and good conscience can no longer stand silently while a belligerent minority usurps our heritage and dictates how and where we express our religious freedoms,” he continued. “It is time to make a statement….” This is some slick shootin’ from Sheriff Jim. In response to the discussion of whether Fort Collins lacks inclusiveness in its public holiday displays, Alderden and others have concluded that Christmas, and the city and nation’s Christian heritage, is the element of diversity that is being ignored. But not so at the sheriff’s office. After the Duke wraps up the pledge, Alderden speaks to a crowd of roughly a hundred admirers, calling the task force “angry, bitter politically correct elitists.” (No wonder it’s so hard for the city and county to recruit citizens for volunteer boards.) “To try to divorce God from government is, I don’t believe, possible or wise,” Alderden says. To make his point, he does a Da Vinci Code-esque breakdown of the state seal, which includes the Latin saying “Nil sine Numine” — “Nothing without Providence” — and the seven-pointed star of the sheriff’s badge, which symbolizes the seven seals of the apocalypse as detailed in the Book of Revelation. (For the record, the seven-pointed star is also symbolic for Western Kabbalah, the new-agey, Jewish mystical sect; the Cherokee Nation; and Wiccans, who believe it represents a belief in fairies.) Not that A Very Alderden Christmas is only about recognizing the birth of Jesus. A small, plug-in menorah sits next to a silhouetted nativity scene on a grassy knoll, a few paces away from the donated Christmas tree on the sheriff’s lawn. Alderden says he even invited Rabbi Yerachmiel Gorelik of the Chabad Jewish Center of Northern Colorado to partake in the event, but it turns out Saturdays are the Hebrew day of rest and prayer, so Gorelik doesn’t travel. Later, speaking on KCOL 600 AM, Alderden explains why he jumped into the fray, saying that he holds his position “by God’s will,” after the Lord intervened in the November 2005 election to help pass a ballot measure that enables Larimer County officials to hold office for three terms, instead of two. The vote allowed the sheriff to run for and win a last term in 2006, and he’s clearly making the most of it. “I answer to a higher authority,” Alderden says on-air. We’re pretty sure he’s not talking about John Wayne. |
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