Current mood:	confused
Current music:	I Love My Car - Belle and Sebastian
Entry tags:	philosophy, politics

San Francisco is misunderstood
I was at an Easter party yesterday and, at one point, mentioned how I'd been surprised last year to discover that Good Friday isn't a statutory holiday here the way it is in Canada. A random person sitting beside me then remarked, "well, that's how it is when you live in a place where the government is hostile to religion". A little stunned by that apparently skewed perception, I turned to him and said, "what do you mean? I don't think the federal government is hostile to religion in this country!" He explained that he'd meant the municipal government of San Francisco. I explained to him that statutory holidays were determined at the federal (and sometimes state) level but never municipally. At that point the conversation drifted to something else but it got me thinking about the perception that this city is somehow hostile to religion. I don't get it. I've never lived in a city that was more in keeping with the core message of any decent religion: love and acceptance for the marginalized and the downtrodden.