Anti-Halloween attacks are downright ghastly

By ELLIS HENICAN

LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

Who needs to wait for another hyped-up “War on Christmas?”

It’s only mid-October. And we’re already in the thick of a breathless national “Assault on Halloween.”

Consider yourself warned, you precious little trick-or-treaters, you toilet-paper-tossing miscreants: A week before the greatest kids’ holiday of the year, a bunch of nay-saying grownups are hell-bent on spoiling the fun.

Apparently, every major holiday has to be a major controversy now.

I’m not here to defend the genuine idiots. Some junior hoodlums will take anything too far. Like those paintball morons who are threatening to fire off frozen pellets this year. “Why not live ammo?” one of these dopes will be suggesting next.

They want that kind of recklessness? Lock ‘em up, I say.

But none of this is any excuse for this latest eruption of anti-Halloween zeal. Interest groups left and right — Christian, Muslim and Wiccan — are finding new reasons to be outraged about Halloween.

Devil worship?

Fundamentalist Christians warn the celebration promotes devil worship. Prudes and feminists say the costumes have gotten too risque. Civil-rights groups complain that too many Halloween ghosts resemble lynching victims. Even the witches feel aggrieved — and you probably thought Halloween was the witches’ big night!

In New Jersey last week, Cheryl and David Maines faced angry protests and death threats until they took down a holiday display that had adorned their house in Madison without complaint for the past seven years. The decorations included a ghost on a rope, which someone apparently saw as a metaphor for lynching.

In Chicopee, Mass., Kelly Lynch, who says she is a witch, is demanding that her East Street neighbor take down his Halloween display. It included a hanging witch. If he doesn’t, Lynch demanded, he should be arrested for a hate crime.

These anti-Halloween eruptions are now breaking out everywhere. In Glynn County, Ga., there will be no cutouts of witches or skeletons on classroom doors. Can’t be promoting paganism, the principal said after religious groups complained.

In Brooklyn, the Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences sent out a note to parents last week, spelling out a new rule: No more costume-wearing on Halloween. Not after junior Walter Petryk’s frightening get-up last year: a fuhrer mustache and Nazi uniform.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another on Halloween — from any interest group with its own fax machine.

Environmentalists are upset about synthetic costumes. The anti-commercial advocates say the costumes promote profit-driven brands like Spider-Man or SpongeBob SquarePants. Even the nurses are mad. Too many “naughty-nurse” get-ups make these professionals seem like “sponge-bath sex zombies.”

Intellectual support

And you knew it had to happen: The anti-Halloween zealots are now getting intellectual support from spoil-the-fun scholars such as Charles Haynes of the Freedom Forum.

“For many school administrators,” Haynes warns just in time for Oct. 31, “Halloween is no longer any fun. They’re caught in the crossfire between parents who support and parents who oppose Halloween observances in the classroom.”

It’s crucial, Haynes contends, that schools allow parents to “opt out” of all Halloween festivities, although he warns that may not be easy “if Halloween pervades the classroom for days.” Kids, after all, do like candy and fun.

X Ellis Henican is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.