Monday, July 30, 2007

USA Today: Some say schools giving Muslims special treatment.

Yes, you can include me in the some. I have been saying it for quite a while now.

In this article by Oren Dorrell writes that some public schools and universities are granting Muslims requests for prayer times, prayer rooms and ritual foot baths.

University of Michigan at Dearborn has plans to build a footbath for Muslim students to wash their feet before prayer.

An elementary school in San Diego allows an extra recess period for Muslim students to pray.

Amazing, all this is being paid with your tax dollars. Isn’t that just great. So much for separation of church and state, in fact where is the ACLU on this? Well, it seems this is a gray area.

Barry Lynn, of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, says however that the law is murky on these expressions of faith. And the American Civil Liberties Union says overt religious symbols like crucifixes are not legal, but whether Muslim footbaths and prayer rugs fall into that category is not clear.

"That's a difficult one, and it's right on the edge," says Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU program on freedom of religion and belief in Washington, D.C.

The ACLU claims they are waiting to see what kind of policy the schools settles on before deciding whether to sue or not.
I guess that must be because the “law is murky” or just “not clear.” Well, let me clear the water up for you.

It is pretty obvious what kind of policies the schools are deciding to settle on. Here is an idea, how about trying to get extra recess sessions for Christian and Catholic students to pray. How far do you think you would get with that before the ACLU puts a stop to it? They definitely would not be using the where going to see where the school settles on before we sue routine. They have filed lawsuits for quite less in the past.

This is nothing less than a victory for Muslims who wish to see the United States under Islamic Law. They continue to use political correctness as their weapon to accomplish their goals.
Now before you start with the hate mail, let me make it clear, I know not all Muslims care about an Islamic state, in fact most probably just want to be left alone, but there are far to many that would use the power of government to achieve Islamic law.

I use to not believe in the separation of Church and State. I believe that Thomas Jefferson was not in favor of religious abolition from the public spectrum, but rather was trying to say one religion should not be favored over the other. However, it now seems the only way to do that is to have separation of Church and State.

Let’s be honest, while we are at it. There are several Christian groups in this country that are just as guilty of using the power of government to try and spread their laws as well.

There, now I will get hate mail from both groups!

1 comment:

Dan S said...

"I use to not believe in the separation of Church and State. I believe that Thomas Jefferson was not in favor of religious abolition from the public spectrum, but rather was trying to say one religion should not be favored over the other. However, it now seems the only way to do that is to have separation of Church and State."

I think this is right on. People being free to practice their own religions shouldn't require abolishing religion from the public sphere. But the problem is that too many people are not content to merely practice their religion. They feel the need to prostelytize and attempt to convert others (be they Christians or Muslims) using government power, which is inappropriate for a secular democracy. Or maybe another way to say it is that this breaks down when people's religion *requires* them to convert others, and the only way to solve that problem is to separate church and state so government can't be put into service for one group's religious ideas.

One only need to look at Iran for what happens when religion and government are not separate to see why it is so critically important.