There's been a fair bit of controversy this year about how Americans celebrate Christmas.

Many people, particularly those who are politically conservative and religious, say that the celebration of Christmas has become too secular - too much Santa, too many watered-down messages (like "Season's Greetings"), too many schools avoiding singing Christmas carols. (Actually, here's a neat piece on just how we came to celebrate December 25 as the birth of Jesus, when there is in fact no historical data that points to it as the correct date.)

The talking heads of radio and cable TV have taken up the chant, and have devoted considerable airtime to the topic. In a fashion to which we have all become familiar, these voices (with their shared 'talking points') dominate the discussion with righteous indignation.

I'm not a particularly religious person (in the sense of organized religion, that is; I have very strong spiritual beliefs). But I find myself, for once, in agreement with these voices. I don't see anything wrong with wishing people 'Merry Christmas,'or with spending more time talking about why we celebrate Christmas at this time of the year. It makes perfect sense to me.

But I wouldn't stop there.

I think the idea of celebrating religious holidays is a very good one. Only let's not just mark Christian ones.

I'm all in favor of public (not in the sense of government-sponsored - the separation of church and state is still a pretty good idea) celebrations of other religious occasions like Passover, Yom Kippur (after all Hanukkah is really a minor Jewish holiday elevated to a higher status because of its proximity to Christmas), Ramadan, Eid, or even less well-known religious occasions like the Hindu festival of lights, known as Diwali, celebrated in November.

If we took the time to pay attention to these religious occasions and festivals, we would quickly become aware of just what a diverse nation America has become. The majority of Americans may be Christians, but the reality is that our nation has become what founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson wanted - a huge repository of diverse religious beliefs.

While not every religious festival may deserve a federal holiday (it's my guess that with the range of religious beliefs in America, we would never get to work if each one was a holiday), paying more attention to these events would provide a valuable education to all Americans, particularly young ones.

Even those with no religious beliefs would probably complain less about the celebration of Christian occasions like Christmas if we approached other religious holidays with the same respect and interest.

Because it's amazing what a little dialogue can do. For instance, take the lessons taught to me by a young Jewish girl named Rebecca, who I met about 12 years ago. She was eight at the time, and was the granddaughter of my landlady during my year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

It was Passover, and Rebecca had brought to my apartment all the leavened bread they had in their house. My role was to purchase it for a dollar, and then after Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread, sell it back. (My landlady kept a very kosher house.)

Rebecca and I started talking, and she spent the next hour telling me about the Jewish celebration of Passover, and why it was important to her and her family. I learned more about Judaism in that one-hour discussion than I had in the previous 35 years of my existence on this planet. I've often thought that this is the kind of discussion we need to have with each other when America's religious communities celebrate their special days.

So let's not close down the religious conversations, let's open them up to everyone. Because we'll soon learn there are many reasons for the seasons.

I can't remember a time where differences between my former country, Canada, and my new country, the USA, seemed so crystal clear.

In a 9-0 ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court last week, conservative and liberal justices alike said that gay marriage is constitutional. (The justices also said that religious ministers cannot be forced against their wills to officiate at same-sex weddings.) Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin said he would introduce a bill allowing gay marriage before parliament in early January.

I saw a Canadian anti-gay advocate appear on The O'Reilly Factor the other night, and he said the legislation wouldn't pass.  But he's wrong. Tallies of how legislators will vote show that there are enough votes in parliament to pass the legislation and enough support in the public for the measure. I expect Canada will have same-sex marriage across the country (six provinces already allow it) before the snow melts in the spring.

Meanwhile, I read a very interesting piece in the Guardian about a Republican state representative in Alabama who just introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle."

"Traditional family values," Gerald Allen argues, are under attack and have been for the last 40 years. The culprits? The usual suspects: Hollywood, the music industry, the "liberal media elites."

And it's not just easy targets like Tennessee Williams or Oscar Wilde that Allen has in his sights. A story in an Alabama newspaper reports that he even has a few concerns about some of the works by that guy Shakespeare. (Allen should do himself a favor and just look up bowdlerized on Google to learn he's kinda behind the curve on that one. Didn't work so well in the 1800s either.)

Allen's final solution to the problem is to just dump all the offending books into a big hole and bury them there. (Apparently he hasn't considered burning them yet, but more on that below.)

President Bush has invited Allen to the White House five times over the past few years, which Allen says have included some conversations about this kind of bill. Perhaps the president thinks that a similar national bill might be a good idea?

I wonder where exactly it would all stop. For instance, would Allen's bill carry over to artistic works created by gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, or people whom historians believe fall into these categories? I mean, what if Alabama students learned that their favorite books, paintings, musical compositions or plays were created by such individuals?

School books, for instance, would no longer be allowed to carry pictures of statues or paintings by Michelangelo, particularly those really famous ones of biblical figures such as David (no fig leaf) and the Pieta, which depicts Mary holding the body of Jesus taken down from the cross. 

They might cast homosexuality in way too positive a light if the kids were aware that historians believe Michelangelo was gay. (Hmm...this could mean that traditional family values have actually been under attack for 500 years, not 40.)

Military schools in Alabama would have to stop using books that teach about Alexander the Great, who is believed to have been bisexual. And those Hans Christian Andersen stories about the "Ugly Duckling" and "The Emperor's New Clothes"  - keep them away from the kids. Dangerous mind-rotting stuff from the wrong kind of role model.

Let's see, who else would see their works buried in the hole because of who they are or suspicions about their "lifestyles" ... Aristotle, St. Augustine, Edward Albee, Sir Francis Bacon, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (makes teaching that anti-slavery stuff tricky, eh), Susan B. Anthony, Horatio Alger, Beethoven, Leonard Bernstein, Botticelli, Euripides, composer Stephen Foster (no state-funded singing of "Oh, Suzanna"), Edvard Greig ("In the Hall of the Mountain King," indeed), Aaron Copeland, Bill T. Jones (out go Shirley Temple movies with 'Mr. Bojangles"), Danny Kaye, Lord Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Pope Leo X (one of at least six popes believed to have been gay), Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, Ian McKellen (no Gandalf, no Lord of the Rings), British poet John Milton, Plato, Socrates, Tchaikovsky, Walt Whitman, Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, and the Greek philosopher Zeno. To name but a few.

So basically, under Allen's bill, publicly funded schools, colleges and universities in Alabama could potentially vanish because, well, there wouldn't be enough curriculum left to teach. Just too many things that might cast too positive a light on homosexuality.

(And just to make sure he didn't miss anything, Allen says that his bill would also cover any book or material that depicts ANY kind of alternative lifestyle - alternative to his own, apparently - as also inappropriate and not worth public funding.)

Oh my.

This idea smacks of censorship and a thundering ignorance of art, culture, and literature and the meaning they have for many people. And I would sincerely counsel President Bush not to adopt it in a national form, or he's in for a world of trouble, plain, pure and simple.

As the father of four smart kids, the idea that someone, anyone, will try and tell me what they can read, see or hear, in a public school is an insult and about the most un-American thing I can envision. I'm the one who gets to make those decisions, and I'm the one who should be making them.

After all I absolutely understand that parents want to "protect" children from materials the parents find objectionable. That's part of what you do when you're a mom or dad. I'm that way about violence and commercial children's TV. I closely monitor what they watch, read and hear. And I talk to them a lot about the images they see, the books they read, and the music they listen to.

But when that parental concern makes the leap to publicly banning an entire class of books or material based on content that some people find objectionable, then you have opened Pandora's box, because somebody will always find something objectionable in everything.

In this way Allen's book-banning bill shows itself to be the ideological cousin of the kind of "political correctness" that many on the right associate with the left.

And about state-funded programs; that's such a red herring. For instance, I don't want my tax dollars used to build atomic bombs, or used to snoop on the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. That's the way, however, the system works: tax money is not allocated based on what only appeals to a certain group.

Yet sadly, in Allen's ideas, we may be seeing just the tip of the cultural iceberg. Zealots would legislate what we read, watch, and think if they could. They long for the day when we're all just Stepford citizens.

But there are deeper, more troubling issues here.

To deplore anything by or about homosexuals is mean-spirited and shortsighted. But in a larger context, to deplore and loathe a whole group of people based on a particular trait is a dangerous road to go down. We saw a certain country in Europe take that disastrous road between 1939 and 1945.

There is a thin line between private opinion and public bigotry of which we must always be aware. That's why recent events, like the ones mentioned above, leave me to wonder if more book-burnings (or buryings) and even perhaps pink triangles may be on some people's long-term agendas.