Well, someone's been paying attention to the garbage going on in Seattle.

According to the Daily Mail:

A Seattle official has been handed a sarcastic award for banning city workers from displaying Christmas or Hanukkah decorations in their own homes while on Zoom calls to avoid offending colleagues with different beliefs. 

Gloria Ngezaho is the workforce equity manager for King County, which encompasses Seattle, and was handed the Ebenezer Award from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Ngezaho's draconian edict was first revealed in November, and he was handed the award last week over his 'Guidelines for Holiday Decorations' rules.  

The guidelines banned county employees from showing religious items on their video backgrounds, including Nativity sets, the crucifix, the Star of David and menorahs. 

The rules explicitly state that public showings of religious beliefs 'may cause disruption to co-workers or members of the public that do not share that particular religion.' 

It was disgusting stuff, and irrational, too.

Not only was it an invasion of employees' right to privacy in their own homes -- the Zoom requirement, after all, was an invasion of sorts -- the micromanagement of what they could display in their own homes, on the spurious grounds that sight of it may offend someone who can't handle a different religion from his/her/their/zer/whatever own -- was a naked violation of the First Amendment, too, that ought to have been legally challenged on that ground alone. Weirdly enough, the command from this clown came with permission to display religious items in one's own personal workspace on state property, but not in one's home. It was inchoate stuff.

Speaking of someone with too much power...

The diktat's "logic" was about the importance of not offending other people by one's identity was so crappy it's the sort of thing that could be extended to other things such as people's names, or the holiday itself. Should someone named "Maria Concepcion, Isaiah, or Juan Pablo" be required to give up their clearly religiously referenced name to prevent offense to someone who can't handle it? What's Ngezaho's first name? Gloria? That's obviously a religious reference, too, common in his native Burundi and other parts of Africa, intended to deliver praise to God. Well, since "Gloria" doesn't reference anything but God, then that name has got to go, too, it might offend an atheist or a Satanist. Same with his kid, reportedly named "Baby Jordan," which includes another unwelcome Judaeo-Christian reference. 

Ngezaho's logic, were it to be left standing, would have to apply to the holidays themselves, Christmas and Hanukkah, as well. Why have these days off at all since they are religious in origin and thus, might offend a Muslim or Satanist who can't tolerate other people's traditional holidays?

The whole "might offend" logic smells of tribalism, and the barbaric activity that still goes on in parts of Africa. I can't tell whether Ngezaho is a Hutu or a Tutsi, which is what's on offer in that country, same as Rwanda, but it certainly sounds like he's promoting Hutu-Tutsi-style intolerance of others who are different, and hasw projected that folkway onto the United States. He emigrated to the U.S. in the 1990s, moved to Portland, Oregon, was handed every opportunity a free country can give him and is now on record through his activism as considering this country a racist hellhole. He's the "president/founder" of something called the "Black Healing Fund" which is affiliated with Black Lives Matter. According to the Christian Post:

A CP review of Ngezaho's profile reveals that in addition to his role with King County, he also is the president and founder of Black Healing Fund (BHF), a nonprofit organization based out of Snohomish, Washington, working to "assist in the fight against the mental, health, & economic impact of anti-blackness."

Along with providing free resources like backpacks and school supplies to families in the black and African community, BHF also endorses and offers resources featuring controversial views on race, including critical race theory.

A list of resources on the BHF site includes "resources for white allies," with titles such as Understanding White Supremacy Culture, a toolkit for What is White Privilege Really?, and a Racial Healing Handbook on how to become "antiracist." 

BHF's Twitter account also espouses potentially racist views, including one tweet that reads, "The white 'race' was invented by rich Virginians in 1676" and links to a Boston NPR program entitled, "The History Of White People In America, Episode One: How America Invented Race."

Racial grievance-mongering is all he's got for religion and it's pretty clear that he doesn't want anyone else to have any, either.

It's repulsive stuff, given that this guy is an immigrant, presumably one who came to the U.S. for its freedom, or in his case, probably money, and now illegitimately exerts power as a ruling state bureaucrat, the Workforce Equity Manager for King County’s Department of Human Resources to limit First Amendment freedoms on actual Americans.

He comes off as a confused and resentful character out of the pages of V.S. Naipaul's books, a counterpart to ungrateful Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, so common in her native Somalia, is well known.

Like the characters skewered by Naipaul, he's an extreme mediocrity with a taste for power and delusions of grandeur.

He has no academic excellence to speak of -- he went to a couple of bottom of the barrel universities, got a string of degrees, got a non-competitive-entrance certificate from Harvard, and demands to be called "Dr." on his LinkedIn page the way they all do, writing a few utterly mediocre books with rock-bottom rankings on Amazon.

He's also undoubtedly resentful as heck, having unsuccessfully run for an Oregon statehouse office in 2016 and losing by about 50 points to a rival with a Latino name, according to Ballotpedia. After that, he moved up to Seattle to exert power as a self-glorifying bureaucrat who issues Idi Amin-like ridiculous commands, and is amazing to see that the Seattle wokesters follow them. 

One wonders why so many of these wretchedly ungrateful people with a taste for power are being let into this country, given their propensity to impose their own cultural folkways onto the U.S., making it more like Burundi or Somalia with its tribal resentments and terror at creating offense, than assimilating instead into the U.S. and making themselves success stories.

This is a jackass, and it's good to see that it's on record that he got this award handed to him for his hostility to the First Amendment. He not only shouldn't be elected to public office in the U.S., he ought to be fired from his day job. He longs for power and he's willing to use it illegitimately. If Seattle's wokesters don't get rid of this guy, then they full well deserve him.

Image:  Wikipedia // public domain