Evan Coyne Maloney notes that Toronto's schools have banned Halloween:

Last week, teachers in Toronto received a memo from the District School Board advising them to "forego traditional classroom Halloween celebrations because they are disrespectful of Wiccans and may cause some children to feel excluded."

Evan adds:

what kind of culture will we be left with if we rid ourselves of everything that makes us unique just so we don't offend any new arrivals? We bend over backwards to accommodate every foreign and fringe culture, but at the same time, we don't even show half that respect to the culture that already exists here.

Are the High Priests of Political Correctness really concerned with being open to other cultures? Or is their real goal to destroy ours?

My money's on the latter. In his latest Newhouse essay, James Lileks looks at Canada's mother country:

Government workers in the West Midlands were ordered to remove or hide anything with a pig on it, including a tissue box that contained a picture of The Littlest Satan, Piglet. (One Muslim citizen had complained. One.) In 2003, a West Yorkshire school removed books from classrooms because they contained pigs. Out went Busytown volumes and "Charlotte's Web." In came cultural apartheid.

At the risk of alienating those who wish to pave the Middle East, Islam is not the problem. The Muslim Council of Britain, after all, opposed the pig-book ban.

The problem is Official England: a culture so terrified of asserting itself that it caves every time someone announces he's offended. The proper response to anti-pig initiatives? Calmly reply that Britain is not ruled by Shariah, but is composed of many cultures, the beliefs of which occasionally conflict.

Multiculturalism is a fine and necessary idea. Cultures that seal themselves off wither and die. England is better for having ska and curry, just as Saudi Arabia is poorer for lacking, oh, women's rights and a penal code that does not hand out amputation. So to speak.

But as an ideology, multiculturalism is not only predicated on a falsehood, but a lie even it doesn't believe.

Multi-culti dogma asserts that all cultures are equal, but refuses to defend the dominant culture when assailed for insensitivity, no matter how retrograde or niggling the charge. Rather than assert the primacy of a generally shared idea, it simply eliminates any official manifestations of the idea. Problem solved! See also, Christmas.

Europe today, America tomorrow?

Only slightly apropos of James' comments, it's fascinating to flip through the latest Brooks Brothers "Holiday" catalog. It's filled with happy, shiny people in expensive, conservative clothes standing in front of holly, and wreaths--and even verdant trees temporarily placed inside homes during the month of December with brightly colored baubles and lights hung on them...and not one mention of the C-word anywhere in the catalog.