CAIR to the Rescue of School Prayer

From yesterday's Houston Chronicle is an interesting piece which indicates how prayer will return to the public schools: The Moslems will get it first. The story starts out innocuously enough with a Moslem student getting permission to pray privately during spare time.

Her family contacted a Muslim advocacy group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations [link added], which asked the school district to reconsider. Eventually, the district acknowledged it had no policy preventing a student from praying on his or her own during free time, and allowed Yasmeen to use an empty classroom to unfurl her prayer rug, face Mecca and touch her head to the floor in a few moments of worship.

Why was this such a big deal? I am sure it was because when the girl asked for permission to pray, the teacher was afraid of getting into trouble with her school district over it. After all, the leftist establishment is famous for making a mockery of the establishment clause. For example, the Declaration of Independence was once banned from a history class by a district in California for mentioning God.

So instead of a teacher quietly (and reasonably) letting a student excuse herself for a short time every day to pray, we now have public schools officially making a big deal out of accommodating students' religious observances. The story also mentions Moslem students fasting at lunch during Ramadan. This is even less of a big deal than a student praying in private: The kids merely need to refrain from eating! Yet this, too, was made into a big deal. Hint: Something other than fasting was the goal, as you will see.

Of course, the problem doesn't really lie with whether children should or should not hold religious observances in school. It lies with the fact that the government is in the education business at all. This fact necessarily implies that whatever ideas are taught or sanctioned by a public school are being spread by the government, raising legitimate concerns over whether, in the case of religious ideas, the establishment clause is being violated. It also raises the more fundamental issue of whether the government should be taking our money from us by force to teach children ideas to which we are opposed. The left is indifferent to this concern, because it is indifferent to the entire concept of private property. The right is also indifferent since it has no fundamental objection to the use of government force to promote Christianity.

The ultimate solution to such difficulties would, of course, be to privatize the education system. But where might our unchallenged public system take us? The remainder of the article gives us one hint and the willingness of conservatives to exploit multiculturalism gives us another.

With CAIR behind them, Moslem students in several places are seeking and winning special privileges. Here are a few examples from the article, with numerals added and my comments afterwards in bold.

(1) Debra Mason of Jersey City dropped out of Fairleigh Dickinson University's nursing program after she said she was told to remove her head covering during patient rounds. The New Jersey civil rights division recently found probable cause to proceed with an investigation into whether the school violated her rights. This resembles a similar story awhile back concerning a Moslem who wished to conceal her face in her Florida driver's license photos. Also, I can think of several good reasons why a nurse should not have her head covered during rounds.

(2) A zero-tolerance policy on harassment of Muslim students was adopted by Florida's Broward County school board in March 2003, just before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The important question is this: where does legitimately protecting Moslem children end and training in dhimmitude for non-Moslem children begin?

(3) Paterson, N.J. ... is one of a handful of New Jersey districts that closes schools for Eid-al-Fitr, a Muslim religious holiday. HISD doesn't even dare to call Christmas break "Christmas Break", even though the holiday has become quite secularized.

(4) Montgomery County school district in Maryland ... [sent] teachers and administrators to annual Ramadan celebrations marking the holiest month of the Muslim calendar. WTF?

So much for separation of church and state. Oh, wait, but Moslems use mosques, so it must be okay! On the grounds of "not persecuting" Moslems, then, our public schools are becoming more and more accommodating to them, even to the point of treating them like a protected class of citizens.

And with our public schools making such generous concessions to Islam, it will only be a matter of time before Christians start demanding the same level of accommodation. As I noted in an earlier post about the banning of the Declaration of Independence -- because it mentioned God -- in California:

It's bad enough that some idiot is making a mockery of the Establishment Clause by banning the Declaration of Independence from a history lesson. What's worse is the grounds being used to fight this lunacy: "Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian."

And this is hardly a lone crackpot. I have pointed out more extensively elsewhere that the religious right, far from being an opponent of multiculturalist "hate crimes" legislation, is quite willing to take advantage of it. It is only a matter of time, once Moslems obtain a sufficient degree of "accommodation", before the Christians will insist that their religious activities be officially recognized as well. Official sanction of prayer and other religious activities at public schools won't be too far off from that point.

Once again, the "secular" left, between its unthinking zeal to expunge even the Christian heritage of our nation from the public schools and its similar zeal to enforce "tolerance" of anything so long as it is not Western, is paving the way for the religious right.

-- CAV