Megyn Kelley apparently started the current kerfluffle by having the temerity to say that Santa Claus was white, sparking left-wing guffaws and the criticism of Laura Nasrallah, an associate professor at Harvard, who said Santa couldn’t have a race because he wasn’t real.
The NY Sun, who cleared up the issue back in 1897, now weighs in.
Via NY Sun:
Six generations after The New York Sun — in the most famous newspaper editorial ever issued — reassured Miss O’Hanlon, age eight, that, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” we are called upon again. This time it’s not Miss O’Hanlon’s “little friends,” as she put it in her letter to the Sun, who are insisting there is no Santa. It’s a professor, at Harvard University no less, who has been consulted by Politico, which is reporting that the teacher is denying the existence of Saint Nick. So a telegram from a reader asks us to “weigh in.” An editor’s work is never done.
Politico is quoting Laura Nasrallah, an associate professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Divinity School at Harvard. A picture of her on the Web gives the impression that she is a person of cheerful spirit. That and her line of work would suggest Ms. Nasrallah’s confusion is a bit different from Virginia O’Hanlon’s friends who were, the Sun explained to her, “wrong” and “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” For it seems, according to the Web site of the Massachusetts Bible Society, that Ms. Nasrallah in her teaching emphasizes “issues of colonialism, gender, status, and politics.”