When I was 11 years old and entering Middle School my family moved from Miami to Alief, a suburb of Houston. Only days before my first Christmas in Texas, a large high school student wearing cowboy boots and chewing tobacco confronted me.

“You a Jew?” he angrily inquired. “How could you people not believe in Jesus after you murdered him? Did you know it’s Jesus’ birthday? If Jesus Christ ain’t the son of God, who the hell is?”

This is the type of pressure often faced by non-Christians in conservative school districts. There can sometimes be an enormous amount of coercion to conform to the majority view, particualrly around Christmas, when the “Jesus is the reason for the season” crowd, wants to let non-Christians know they are an alien species in a “Christian Nation. While I am certain things have improved since I was 11, in 1981, there are still pockets of bigotry and religious intolerance in America.

As recognition that religious majorities often make religious minorities feel left out, as well as to follow that pesky “separation of church and state” rule that keeps our country free, we don’t use public schools to shove religion down the throats of pupils. Not only would doing so be illegal, but it is also rude and obnoxious behavior – violating the spirit of Christmas.

Unfortunately, not everyone is smart enough to understand the wisdom of ensuring that our public schools are not turned into private fundamentalist church services. A terribly misguided substitute teacher in Redding, Calif., Merry Hyatt, is sponsoring a ballot initiative that would require all public schools in California to give children the opportunity to sing or listen to religious Christmas carols.

“For years and years, maybe one person has been able to ruin it for an entire school,” Hyatt said. “It’s not right. I think it’s the majority’s turn.”

Hyatt is mindlessly promoting a myopic and shortsighted idea designed to make non-Christians uncomfortable in the hope they will convert to Christianity in order to feel accepted and fit in. Portraying religious minorities as the Grinch who stole Christmas is also exploitative, because students are a captive audience who would have no choice but to endure unwanted proselytizing – sometimes at the hands of older, larger tobacco spitting students in cowboy boots.

Of course, the unspoken subtext is that such bullying is precisely what people like Hyatt are truly after. They want consequences to be paid for anyone who is not a fundamentalist or for GLBT students, who would also face increased persecution in a more religious public school atmosphere, given that faiths practiced in conservative areas are largely anti-gay.

People like Hyatt worship mob rule as long as they are in the majority, where they can force their sectarian views onto others. I’m not sure how tolerant people of her ilk would be if, for example, a majority Muslim public school in Dearborn, Michigan, forced Christians to celebrate Ramadan. Or, a majority Catholic public school made a picture of the Pope mandatory in classrooms. How about a majority Jewish school jettisoning Christmas songs in favor of Hanukkah ditties? What about a New Age Winter celebration in liberal public schools at the expense of Christmas altogether?

“It’s sad and it’s wrong to have a Christmas party and not mention Jesus,” said Hyatt. “It’s his birthday.”

The undeniable fact is, Hyatt can sing religious songs at any moment of her choosing, when she is off the clock. She can attend church every day of the week if she wants to. So, clearly, this is not about religious freedom, nor is it about Hyatt being denied her ability to practice her faith.

No, this is about her not being content to practice her faith privately, and having a predatory desire to inflict her beliefs on others without their consent. This is about her wanting to use public money to peddle her religious ideas on public property – which is paid for by all of us.

Prior to her stint as a substitute teacher, Hyatt taught at a Christian school for a year. This, of course, was the proper venue for her cloying need to indoctrinate children and hammer home her narrow worldview. Instead, she wants to obliterate parents’ rights, by subjecting children to religious dogma and a conservative worldview that violates the beliefs of many mothers and fathers.

Under her proposed measure, students who don’t want to participate, or whose parents don’t want them to participate, could be excused.

“They can have a holiday party in the other room,” she said. “Or if they don’t want a party, they can have social studies or some other learning experience.”

Yes, of course they could, and be heckled and treated like heathen freaks by their peers…just the way intolerant zealots like Hyatt want it to be.

The single biggest threat to Christmas — Hanukkah, of course — is coming to a close today.

But Focus on the Family’s war against religious holidays other than Christmas is still going strong.

Focus pundit Carrie Gordon Earll applauds efforts to commercialize Christmas — provided that retailers of cheap foreign-sweatshop goods withhold recognition of the season’s other religious holidays. Earll said yesterday:

And so it’s a little silly for the retailers to ask for our purchasing dollars in the month of December, but not to recognize Christmas. And when you look at the polls, the majority of people in this country prefer “Christmas” over “Happy Holidays.”

Focus does not wish to encourage retailers to recognize specific religious holidays other than Christmas. In order to keep Christian Rightist minds focused solely and selfishly upon Christmas, Focus has created a fancy new website where consumers can help commercialize and politicize Christmas by rating 29 retailers on whether they single out Christmas for special treatment.

If you favor commercialization of Christmas at the expense of other religious celebrations, then — Focus says — you truly “Stand for Christmas.”

If, however, you oppose retail materialism, respect non-Christian gift-giving, or recognize that Christmas was a pagan holiday long before it was Christianized, then — it would seem — you are at war against Christmas and therefore Christianity.

The reason why we should commercialize and idolize Christmas, Focus says, is to “remind people that this is an important, historic and religious tradition; and to remind people that the purpose of Christmas is to remember that God sent His Son as a baby in a manger, and that is why we give gifts, and that is why we celebrate Christmas. So, we want that to be a big Merry Christmas to our culture.”

Retailers should celebrate Christmas alone, Earll argues, because a “majority” in some unidentified survey preferred “Merry Christmas” over “Happy Holidays.”

So, let us join Focus in wishing a merry materialistic Christmas to all!

Unless you’re Jewish or one of those other non-Christian minorities. (Minorities, according to Focus, must be very very bad.)

If you’re one of those people, then could you please kindly shut up until January? Insecure Christians will thank you for not persecuting them with your existence.

Or, here’s a better idea: Contact Focus’ retailers and tell them that you won’t shop at retailers that disrespect non-Christian customers or that single out Christians for special treatment.

And here’s yet another idea, for Christian readers: Contact Focus’ retailers, tell them that you don’t appreciate fundamentalists’ commercialization of Christmas, and indicate that you will be donating to charities instead. Give your loved ones the gift of yourself this holiday season.

On Christmas Eve, the Pope chastised humanity for “selfishness” — while he preached in gold robes that clearly were not purchased at K-mart. Nothing speaks to shared sacrifice during a recession like an opulent display of wealth by the pontiff, who sat on a throne and wore a gold crown. He might do better reaching the “greedy” paupers if he’d given up his Prada footwear for a trip to Payless Shoes. The Pontiff’s sermon was the equivalent of Donald Trump urging New Yorkers to take mass transit — as he gets out of a stretch limousine.

The Pope’s hypocrisy is as pronounced on issues of poverty as it is on sexual orientation. It is increasingly hard to take him seriously on critical matters of the day.

In his Dec. 22 World Youth Day speech, the Pope spoke about the environment — and somehow tied it to his favorite obsession, homosexuality.

On the environment, the pope said: The earth is “the gift of our Creator, with certain intrinsic rules that offer us an orientation we must respect as administrators of creation. … [The church] must defend not only the earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to all. It must also defend the human person against its own destruction. What’ needed is something like a “human ecology,’ understood in the right sense. It’ not simply an outdated metaphysics if the church speaks of the nature of the human person as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected.”

The pope went on to opine that if humanity ignores this “order of creation,” it is self-destructive. “That which is often expressed and understood by the term “gender’ in the end amounts to the self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator,” and as a result “the human person lives against the truth, against the Creator Spirit,” said the pope.

I saw the movie “Doubt” last night. It was a chilling reminder that this anti-gay church presided over a shocking child sex scandal. Clearly, the Pope has little moral authority to preach to those of us who have hurt no one. He ought to get his gilded palace in order before pointing his manicured fingers covered in gold rings at innocnet people.