I see no hate in saying "happy holidays" at a place that is purpoesfully meant to be for holiday decorations
However I do feel there is a certain amount of hate involved in terms of signs declaring Santa a myth or degrading the notion of religion at a place that is purpoesfully meant to be for holiday decorations.
Your basic mistake is that you are privileging religious displays as having some kind of superior claim to "holidays" over nonreligious ones.
Legally AND ethically speaking, they don't.
The notion that it is hateful to promote the value of accuracy is rather peculiar.
I often see people push the notion that it is cruel to let small children know there is no Santa Claus. I take the opposite stance; I find it cruel and rather transparently manipulative and selfish to deceive children into belief in Santa Claus for the sake of effectively bribing them into decent behavior through promise of material gain.
Albeit with a wider range of bells and whistles, I see theism and many forms of religion in the same light. I can point to all manner of atrocities, crimes, deceptions, and barbaric practices anchored in full or in part to different flavors of theistic religious doctrines, but I'm hard pressed to think of any clear examples of harm genuinely traceable to insistence upon accuracy and transparency.
In any case, as I pointed out to Chaddelamancha, if it is a "dick move" for a display expressing or urging a contrary view to be present, then logically this would mean it's every bit as much a "dick move" on the part of the folks promoting the nativity display to have a display knowing that there will be other displays present. This, I should hope, is clearly seen as a silly conclusion.
The mere presence of contrary views is not dickish or mean or cruel. Instead, it is the unwarranted sense of entitlement on the part of those whose dogmas have gone unchallenged for a long time (for example, for 60+ years) in their *privileged* used of a public space...which has led to them developing a collective glass ego.
Going out of your way to try and gather up as many people as possible to purposefully grab as many of the spots as you can, in hopes of hindering others from having a chance to put up holiday decorations, and then to put up signs that have nothing to do with celebrating the holidays at all but rather do nothing but criticize religion and/or outright working to specifically and purposefully spoil peoples holiday seasons is, if not "hateful", completely and utterly dickish.
As said numerous times before...people are free to be dicks
And I'm free to call them colossal flaming dicks
Yes to both...just as I'm free to point out what a glaring case of hypocrisy it is in your part to privilege the religious displays in that manner.
The unreasonable expectation on the part of the nativity display group -- in which they got used to having no contrary views presented -- led to an unwarranted sense of entitlement to what was a public space. This is a common phenomenon, but that doesn't make it any less mistaken.
Returning to my bus analogy, the public display space no more belongs to the nativity group (or ANY group) than a random bus seat (which a commuter usually gets five days a week). The expectation of possession
--which includes the unwarranted expectation that just because they've had free reign for X amount of time, they should continue to have free reign -- is a mistake on the part of the nativity group.
