Keep St. Patrick Our Own

There's a reason the Guinness brewery in Dublin is that city's most popular tourist attraction, outdrawing even the venerable Book of Kells at Trinity College. The brewmasters at Guinness's St. James Gate facility are extremely good at what they do, which is to produce one of the world's finest stouts.

We wish they would stick to their core competency. Guinness has entered the realm of American politics, however, with a plan to submit a petition to Congress that would make today, St. Patrick's Day, a federal holiday.

The clever marketing behind what the company calls "Proposition 3-17" is admirable. Guinness claims it has accumulated more than 3 million signatures of drinking-age Americans. Nearly every one of those signatures comes from the company's Web site, which allows executives at its corporate parent, the multinational spirits conglomerate Diageo PLC, to learn more about the drinking preferences of its target consumer base.

According to Guinness, the real motivation behind this drive is because "Guinness and Proposition 3-17 supporters believe that a regulated, official holiday would not only reduce the amount of employees missing work in order to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but officially allow people to express their Irishness."

It's unfortunate that an Irish company would suggest that the key elements of expressing "Irishness" include boozing and missing a full day of work. There's nothing quite like a tired stereotype about the Irish that's propagated by the Irish.

But what's really alarming here is that anyone would want to add to this nation's already over-regulated culture by placing another federal holiday on the books — especially one derived from overtly religious sources.

Observing our national holidays is essential to being an American: Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving. Christmas long ago lost its religious overtones and serves along with New Year's Day as a secular winter observance.

Martin Luther King's birthday is now a national holiday. Rounding out our list of federal feasts is Inauguration Day, which only comes along once every four years. What these days have in common is that bundles of mail will sit undelivered, banks will close their doors, and children won't sit in classrooms. All courtesy of American taxpayers.

Adding the religious feast day of St. Patrick to this national pantheon of holidays is not just awkward, it's inappropriate. It was impossible for our founding fathers to anticipate every twist and turn in the American experience in the centuries to come, but one they knew for certain was that a significant part of the young nation's population growth would be non-organic.

They rightly suspected that immigrants to America would become part of this country through the benefits of federalism, the force that transcends state governments, cultures, and religious observances. It's what binds Americans together, no matter how diverse their backgrounds.

St. Patrick's Day fails this threshold of secular transcendence. But it also has problems within its own church calendar. It ranks as a greater feast day only in the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical calendar; in all other churches, the day ranks as a lesser feast. In fact, Roman Catholics in Ireland marvel at the scale with which the day is celebrated in northeastern American cities.

Plus, St. Patrick's Day invariably falls during Lent each year, a season in which Christians of all stripes are supposed to dedicate themselves to penitence and self-denial. This year, St. Patrick's Day doubly falls during Holy Week, the most solemn period in Lent and of the entire church year. Drowning in a sea of Irish stout and missing work to see a festive parade is not the best way to mark such a week.

But people around America, and especially here in New York City, will nevertheless choose to revel in all their green glory today, which is their right. And Guinness will sell a lot of stout. Such a celebration, however, shouldn't be established by our federal government.

Mr. Akasie is a contributor to The New York Sun.