I guess I should be glad they weren't wearing hoods.

Last night we went to part of our daughter's Christmas program at church. The youth group presents a "coffeehouse" (which featured no coffee, incidentally) where they sing secular-ish Christmas songs: Blue Christmas, The Christmas Song, etc. At the close of the first act, they sang a song with which I was unfamiliar, an alternative Christmas story called Leroy, The Redneck Reindeer (link has sound, and is annoying), where Rudolph gets his cousin Leroy to guide Santa's sleigh one night. The song was cute enough until it got to the part where Leroy starts wrapping presents in a rebel flag, and then it became disturbing, as I wondered which houses Leroy skipped over, or worse, on that fateful night.

Worse is the idea that they're teaching kids--my daughter among them--that the display of racist symbolism is okay; that it's something to be celebrated. I recognize the right of the song to exist, to be sung and enjoyed by the sort of people who might sing and enjoy songs about reindeer with a political agenda, but to hear it sung by my daughter in church is more than a little offensive.

Or am I overreacting?