Washington, USA - It's the holidays, a busy time for Santa and shoppers. And lawyers.
Attorneys who specialize in religious expression say they get a spike in calls in November and December, with people calling about everything from public school choirs singing religious songs to Nativity scenes on government property. Some are for, some are against, and some are public officials trying to find out how to avoid being sued.
While the Supreme Court has handed down multiple rulings about religious expression, including several about holiday displays, each case turns on the details, which means fertile ground for competing legal opinions and disagreement.
Exactly how prominent was the Nativity scene on the town green? Was it the only holiday display there? Were the students handing out Christmas cards at school standing where other students couldn't avoid passing?
The questions are endless, and so are the tensions.
In tiny Exmore, on Virginia's Eastern Shore, officials are ignoring a demand that they remove or alter a plastic Nativity scene in front of Town Hall.
"Spines have stiffened," said Herbert Gilsdorf, town manager in Exmore, population 1,500.
Three national legal groups are involved in the dispute there. They disagree over whether a Christmas tree-shaped ornament the town placed on a nearby telephone pole proves -- or disproves -- that the Nativity scene is just part of a broader, generally secular display. Under court rulings, a Christmas tree is not considered a religious symbol.
But all of that is splitting hairs for officials in Exmore. "To be brutally honest, I don't think it would matter to elected officials whether Rudolph or Frosty or whomever were [on the pole], they'd stick with the manger," Gilsdorf said.
Liberty Counsel, a conservative national legal group that sells "I love CHRISTmas" bumper stickers for $3, has received hundreds of holiday-related calls and e-mails, about double the volume as the rest of the year. Mat Staver, the group's chairman, blames a combination of "extreme political correctness" and what he believes is a desire to eliminate religion from America's public culture.
Critics of groups such as Liberty Counsel, one of the organizations involved in Exmore, say they exacerbate the cultural divide. Critics point to Liberty Counsel's five-year-old "Friend or Foe" fundraising campaign, which lists disputes across the country in which the group is involved. For instance, there's the student Bible club in a Massachusetts public school that was stopped from handing out candy canes with religious messages attached and the Florida court clerk who was told she couldn't put up a Nativity scene in her office during Christmas.
To Staver, it's "absurd" to call a Christmas tree a "holiday" tree, to encourage public officials not to say "Merry Christmas," or to in any way downplay the inherently religious story at the root of Christmas, which is a federal holiday.
But to groups concerned about church-state mingling, the issue isn't whether government acknowledges the holidays, but how. The government can't appear to be endorsing one faith over another, said Ayesha Khan, legal director at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.
Supreme Court rulings have said "you can erect a display that sends an overall secular message about the joyous holiday celebration. But you can't erect a display that sends a message that, 'Hey, we love Christ's birth.' It shouldn't be a religious message," Khan said.
Conservative legal groups often disagree with groups such as Americans United about what constitutes "overall" -- whether the religious part of the display dominates. They also view displays that are privately donated but on public property as "private speech," held to a different standard than government speech.
Americans United got about 50 calls this year, double what it typically gets, Khan said. She has sent out about three times as many letters as usual this year to communities that put up a Nativity scene and nothing else. Callers also ask about the legality of gospel performances in schools and school choirs performing at local churches.
"We always get [holiday] complaints from people who object to things we see as permissible, and we don't do anything about those," Khan said. "But some percentage of calls are legitimate, and this year we're getting more legitimate ones than in the past."
Khan believes the Bush administration and conservative advocacy groups are encouraging municipalities to cross the church-state separation line. "Then the holiday becomes a political football to advance a political agenda," she said. "There are forces out there fomenting a divisive perspective on these issues versus an inclusive one, a calming inclusive approach to the issue of diversity."
Thomas Hutton, a senior staff attorney for the National School Boards Association, said his office always gets more calls around the holidays. The group devoted an entire newsletter to holiday-related legal issues three years ago, he said.
This year, however, things seem quieter, possibly because so much attention has been given to the issue that school officials are getting more educated about what is legal and what isn't, Hutton said.
But the disputes remain, and remain bitter. In Exmore, Gilsdorf noted that the town is predominantly Southern Baptist and Methodist and said the only people who complained about the Nativity scene were from Richmond, Norfolk and Washington -- "particularly in Washington," he said.
Khan, whose group requested the town change or take down its display, said the person who brought the issue to Americans United is from Exmore but wants to remain anonymous. "This whole area of law, people are very frightened to come forward," Khan said.
All sides agree the issue will vanish -- literally, if nothing else -- in a matter of days.
"We're stalling until Christmas," Gilsdorf said. "You think we're stupid?"