Once upon a time, a town put up a Halloween display, children smiled at it, and that was the end of the story. One Canadian municipality found that arrangement unacceptable and has now formally apologized for the crime of decorating with Harry Potter. You can read the whole sad business over at the Daily Mail, and I'd recommend sitting down first.

The display, by every account, was cheerful. A bit of Potter whimsy for the season, the sort of thing that would have drawn zero comment in any decade before this one. Then the pro-trans activists arrived online, breathless and furious, declaring that Halloween decorations amount to an endorsement of J.K. Rowling's opinions. The town, rather than telling them to go enjoy autumn, folded like a lawn chair. Out came the apology, and the mop-up began.

The apology fog is thick, so let me clear it. Nobody was denied service. Nobody was harassed. A woman in Scotland wrote some opinions the mob dislikes, and now a town in Canada has to say sorry for decorating in her fictional universe. The books still sell by the millions and children still read them in piles. A decoration is a decoration, and the people who saw a fortress of bigotry in a cardboard broomstick are the ones making everything about the argument, and they've decided the rest of us can't have nice things until we surrender.

I grew up in town where the Rex Theater marquee at Halloween meant Dracula or a double feature, and if somebody didn't like the picture, they waited for the next one. The social contract on decorations used to be simple: some are for you, some aren't, and all of them are gone by Thanksgiving. We've replaced that with a system where the loudest handful of people on the internet gets a veto over crepe paper. I've had bigger crowds disagree with me about John Wayne at a church potluck, and I didn't issue a press release.

Rowling herself, as always, is the subtext. Whatever you think of her essays, the woman wrote the most beloved children's books of the last half century, books that taught a generation that courage means standing up to a mob even when the mob wears robes and claims to be the good guys. There is a level of irony in watching people who claim those books as sacred text behave like the Ministry of Magic in the fifth one, rewriting reality because the truth is inconvenient. The town fathers who apologized have less spine than Cornelius Fudge, and Fudge was written to be a coward on purpose.

What galls me most is the example it sets. Every apology like this teaches a hundred other towns that the safe move is pre-emptive surrender, that Halloween must first be cleared by whoever scans decorations for thoughtcrime. The only way that stops is if some municipality, somewhere, finally says the display stays up. One town clerk with the nerve of Madam Pomfrey would end this nonsense inside a fortnight, because these mobs run entirely on capitulation. They feed on it. Take the food away and they starve.

Hogwarts' motto, for the record, translates to never tickle a sleeping dragon. The dragon has been awake for years now, and it turns out it apologizes for being seen. A town in Canada just found that out. Here's hoping the next one has the good sense to hand out candy instead of sorry notes.