By Andrew L. Seidel | director of strategic response, Freedom From Religion Foundation
The new tree in the Wisconsin Capitol is a sad, artificial specimen with golden beads haphazardly strung about, giving the impression that the legislator-decorators may have had one too many tipples of the spiked eggnog. It reminded me of the flaccid, faded beads stranded in the trees along St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans months after Mardi Gras ended.
State Reps. Paul Tittl, Shae Sortwell, Chuck Wichgers and Dave Murphy erected the tree as a misguided attempt to fight back against the mythical War on Christmas. They decorated the tree and hammed it up for the camera together without masks, a clear violation of the Wisconsin mask mandate that every other citizen must obey. The camera even catches Tittl wiping his maskless nose with a bare hand. One would think that in the middle of a pandemic, with thousands dying and hundreds of thousands in the state infected, these legislators co