In this video, the amusingly named, very right-wing “Americans for Peace and Tolerance” tells us how Wellesley schoolkids were preyed upon by nasty Muslims. It’s in the Globe here.
During a visit with a Jewish group to the same mosque last year, I was invited to join the prayers and did. I asked and was told I could pray to God as I know God and it did not mean I was a Muslim. I enjoyed the experience and it helped demystify the Islamic experience for me. It would be equally good for Muslim kids and adults to attend other religious services, such as Catholic Mass and Jewish services (I have occasionally attended Mass and other Christian services, whether for weddings, funerals or whatever – I participate to the extent it feels right and find the rituals of others interesting – nobody forces anything on you). It appears to me that the insinuation that the schoolkids were “forced to pray to Allah” is a gross distortion by a group that is devoted to finding terrorists or terrorist sympathizers in every mosque.
…not that the schoolchildren prayed at a mosque, but that they prayed at a mosque? I mean, on a public school field trip, I do not think it is appropriate for the children to participate in sectarian prayer. I’m not saying your wrong about what these particular critics are saying, but rather, that theirs may not be the right criticism.
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p>TedF
I tend to agree with hubspoke. Indeed, my only experience in a mosque, or a synagogue for that matter, was as a student in a Catholic parochial school.
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p>But. I don’t see how this can be done in a public school setting. No matter how hard you try, teaching about religion is too easily confused with teaching of religion, and will always offend someone, and the offended someone can easily rely on the peer-pressure forced prayer cases, and win. In or present legal climate, I don’t see how it could be done.
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p>I do think that this is a terrible failure of our educational system. Today, in particular, it might be useful to have more Americans who have some knowledge of what Islam is all about. The vacuum is easily filled by demagogues.
As a teacher, a Catholic, and a dad, I think the idea behind the field trip is wonderful. Those kids will benefit from visiting mosques, churches, temples, and every place inbetween. With religion playing such an influential role in the world, all people–especially children-need to understand who believes what and why. It sounds like a great program, and one that a lot of adults could use!
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p>With that said, we need to be careful when, in a public school setting, we deal with religion. None of the children were ‘hurt’ by saying some prayers, or participating in the Muslim ceremony, but they didn’t go to the mosque to pray: they went to learn about Islam. I can see how people are upset by the students’ actual participation in the prayer time, and I ask you–honestly–to imagine the outrage we’d hear if a bunch of kids, as a part of a school trip, particpated in the Catholic Eucharist. Likewise, as the father of two daughters, I would not want my girls ‘segregated’ during their field trip. I realize that it is a part of Islam, and they are entitled to their beliefs. My daughters, however, are not a part of that, nor will they be (it’s hard enough going to our own church where women are not allowed to be priests).
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p>At the end of the day, I don’t think this is a huge deal, but I hope the school district is more careful next time. Sounds like they will be.
Are you sure they won’t come to a different point of view later in life?
but I can hope. And I can do what I can to teach my daughters that as children of a loving God, they have inherent worth and dignity, as does every other person on this planet.
I don’t see how you reconcile your desire to teach your daughters that they have inherent worth and dignity with continuing to promote a religious environment that indoctrinates them with the premise that they are not sufficiently worthy or dignified to be ordained, and that teaches them that their worth is primarily a function of their fertility.
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p>I get the “loving God” aspect; I don’t get how you reconcile that with today’s Roman Catholic church under the auspices of Cardinal Ratzinger.
Nobody is proposing to “teach them to respect Sharia law”.
From whom? From parents of non-Catholics or from the the Archbishop or something?
I know it’s purely theoretical, but I just don’t think we would even see the level of attention that is being paid to this incident. Also, what if some kids were videotaped kneeling down during a field trip to Trinity Church? Youtube sensation? Three days of chatter on WTKK? I don’t think so.
You’d think it would result in litigation in the Supreme Court or something. Who would make a federal case out of that?
Michaeljc4 raises some important points that I, for one, need to mull over. Context is everything and, given recent events, the outrage portrayed makes me uncomfortable. But I do ask myself how I would feel if I heard the same story about public schoolchildren visiting a Catholic Church and taking part in the Eucharist during a public school field trip.
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p>So friends, let’s make this a teachable moment. What does separation of church and state mean, more generally and in this context? why do religious practices sometimes make people uncomfortable? what does it mean to participate in a religious practice? C’mon — can’t the dialogue about these issues become more meaningful than what position you take? I hope these conversations are taking place alongside such school field trips.
I do need to know why. Please explain why people continue to believe in religions.
…is that the kids prayed of their own accord they were not asked or invited to by either school or mosque personnel.
You read or heard this somewhere?
channel 5
http://www.thebostonchannel.co…
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p>This (from this morning’s Channel Five news) does include the comentary that “But a chaperone says the prayers were voluntary” and then an interview with a chaperone from the trip who says “They weren’t asked to pray, they weren’t refused from going in (Reporter: to obesrve?). Right Well, you could go in and observe and some kids did sit down. There were some kids who sat behind the men and kinda copied them.””
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p>I assume that’s what you meant by “it’s my understanding”?
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p>If so, and the chaperone is correctly interpreting the series of events on the field trip, you think this is an important distinction? Why?
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p>To my mind, the boys (a key gender issue in this case) were clearly “invited” to participate in the prayer, at least in the sense that they were invited in to the room and then allowed to join in the prayer. “Voluntary” is a tricky word when we are talking about children in a formal religious setting and building.
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I do think it’s an important distinction that they were not so much as asked to pray, for the same reason I oppose even “voluntary” prayer in schools. Yesterday’s news appears to indicate that only a handful out of the whole trip did this which suggests to me that it was completely up to them.
The biggest hypocrisy in this whole controversy has been the irony that the right, which usually defends public displays of religion and vigorously defends religions rights to enter the public sphere, is denying it to a religion it dislikes. Meanwhile the secular left, which would hate religion to even be mentioned in public, is now taking the side of religious liberty, even as some on the left want to ban burqa’s and even as others are actively preventing a Greek Orthodox church from being re-built near the Ground Zero site and making the memorial as non-religious as possible. Only a few Catholic writers and Senator Orrin Hatch have been consistently in favor of protecting the Constitution, partly because they know first hand what its like to be on the short end of the stick when it comes to persecution.
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p>Religion is an important aspect of the human condition, and whether you believe or not, to deny someone else their right to express themselves, and to pretend that our personal convictions don’t exist in the public sphere is foolish. I am glad the students were allowed to pray to whomever they chose to at the mosque, I think they learned a lot about Islam and that is a good thing. I would hope the same courtesy would be extended if instead of learning about a minority group they were learning about Christianity, an aspect of humanity that has been quite important to its history for the past 2,000 years. Whether you believe or not, to deny that religion exists and should be respected is to deny an aspect of the human condition.
A few words offered to god in whom they don’t believe? If Allah doesn’t exist, then what matter if some students felt they should be gracious guests and join the ritual? Do they think their children are going to become terrorists because they mumbled some imitation of Arabic in concert with others? It’s such a restrictive, destructive worldview to think that a few syllables represents such a grave insult.
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p>Should the chaperone have tackled any student who dared to stand, who dared to deviate from the careful religious programming they’d imagine for their child? For that matter, where’s the fury about going to a synagogue? Heck, if a field trip to an NHL game resulted in students standing during the Canadian national anthem, would they be similarly insulted?
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p>Are these kind citizen as angry about the pope’s comparisons of atheists to Nazis? Or do they just hate the twisted idea they’ve constructed in their head that they’ve mis-labeled “Islam”?
would you be singing the same tune if it was a Catholic mass or a Christian service they learned about?
For literally decades, liberals have fought any connection between schools and religious practice. Even a ‘moment of silence’ was too coercive. But girls shunted to one side while boys are treated differently is OK – they can be forced NOT to pray to Allah!
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p>Participating in another faith’s services as an adult is good. I have sat at Seder as a guest, I have attended Catholic Mass, although I obviously never took Communiton (Closed table there, not Open like my own denomination). But these are children. But that is an adult decision, not one that is being made by a ‘teacher’ seeking to supplant the backwards views of technical legal guardians.
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p>What in the name of all that is wonderful were children doing being taken to church services during the school day? Would you be defending a group who took kids out of school to go to Mass? If you want to expereicne Muslim CULTURE, why is a place of worship the only place to go? Can you only experience American culture with the Baptists?
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p>Really, isn’t there ANYTHING that mere parents should be allowed to decide for their families any more?
Again I think parents complaining should have read the permission slips and excused their kids if they were so worried, again as I said above, most people are somewhat religious, or have had connections in their lives to religious people, and to pretend that religion doesn’t exist when we are in public is an insult to the very marketplace of ideas that is liberal democracy. I would rather we learn about religions and debate and discuss ethics and morality in school, and luckily most of my teachers were able to do that quite effectively. That said the same forces rightly defending the rights of Muslim Americans to practice their faith are denying it to Christians at the UC law schools, to Christian teachers in public schools, and to other areas where we have a public sphere. I say its a real marketplace of ideas, if you believe in Allah, Christ, Mazda, Baal, or Richard Dawkins you have a seat at the table and a right of equal participation. An atheist should not be chastised in school for expressing his beliefs for fear of offending Christians, and likewise a Christian praying silently to himself before a test or wearing a church related church, or being vocal about their opposition to gay marriage or abortion should be protected. The tea party and other reactionary groups would not be so popular if this country respected the religious freedom of its citizens.
You wrote:
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p>First of all, school is not a place for any school official to publicly “practice their faith”, so long as school attendance is compulsory. A teacher or principal can believe anything they wish, can pray silently to themselves any time they wish, and can express their religious beliefs to any of their peers who choose to listen. I attended public elementary school during the late fifties and early sixties, and my classes were forced to recite the Lord’s Prayer every morning, just before the pledge. I do not want to see us return to that sorry state.
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p>Next, “Atheism” is not a religion or faith tradition. It is a logical error to conflate it with the others. One does not “believe in” Richard Dawkins any more than one believes in Charles Dickens. In a time when too many of us hear casual references to “believing in” evolution or “believing in” global warming, the distinction matters.
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p>Nobody is, or should be, chastised for believing in whatever they choose — Allah, Christ, Mazda, Baal, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. There is a crucial and enormous difference between “believing in” something and practicing it.
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p>American students and teachers are perfectly able to pray silently in school whenever they like. Most American students wear crosses, kipas, or the crescent-moon-and-star whenever they like. I don’t know about teachers, but I’ve never heard any of my friends who teach complain of being unable to wear such items.
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p>I know of no students who are chastised about voicing their opposition to gay marriage or abortion. Teachers and authorities have a moral (if not legal) obligation to be soft-spoken about issues precisely in order to preserve the ability of their students to form and express their own opinion on such matters.
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p>If an adult choosing a career feels that such restrictions on their professional conduct is onerous, they should choose a different career. Military personnel may not publicly ridicule the President while in uniform, even though they have a valid First-Amendment right to say whatever they like whenever they like to whomever they like. That is an important aspect of keeping the military firmly under civilian control. In a similar way, restrictions on the classroom behavior of teachers and other school authorities is an important aspect of preserving religious freedom for children who are compelled to be in school.
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p>I think that the Wellesley matter is between the students involved, their parents, and their school. I think the rest of us should stay out of it. I think it’s long past time for us to lower the inflamed rhetoric about these alleged “restrictions” on religious practice in schools.
Show just one instance of liberals who opposed a “moment of silence”. Jeez, we had one last night at the Red Sox game. We have them all the time. Nobody is opposed to them — they are exactly the right public process to allow those who pray the opportunity to do so privately, those who meditate to do that, those who wonder to themselves if they left the oven on to do that too.
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HERE. And the fact that next to the story is the brief they filed on BEHALF of 51Park is a nice twist of irony.
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p>And that’s just one of the court cases. The number of pundits, columnists, etc., are really too many to link.
We used to hear a lot of similar complaints about sex education: “We don't want our kids having sex at school!” “It's a family matter!” “It will corrupt their morals!” In fact, we still hear those chants from the abstinence-only crowd, but decades of experience and some depressing statistics have shown how wrong they are.
We have learned that teaching adolescents about sex leads to better health for everyone, even when it directly contradicts many old-fashioned concepts. Learning about sex doesn't mean having sex in school, it means talking about the roles and responsibilities that come with sexual maturity. It means our kids are not stumbling around blindly as they enter the sexually active phase of their lives. It means they're less likely to make serious mistakes regarding their own health, and also that they're less likely to fall into some very harmful beliefs and assumptions about other people.
The benefits of a healthy and open attitude when teaching kids about religion are comparable to the benefits of modern sex education. People who are well-informed are generally less fearful, and therefore more tolerant of other religious traditions (unlike “Americans for Peace and Tolerance”). They are also better prepared to recognize real dangers from religious zealots, even when those dangers arise within their own faith communities. If anything, it will improve a student's appreciation of their own religious community.
Simple curiosity may lead a student to prostrate themselves on a prayer rug. So what? If that will undermine years of religious upbringing, then that battle was already lost. Do we still live in a world of magic where performing certain motions while speaking special words will consign someone to supernatural doom? Lighten up, folks, it's not brain-washing. We teach kids how to put on a condom, why not let them experience Muslims prayer if they want to?
By the way, didn't we just invent a new word for what Dennis Hale did? The Wellesley public schools just got “Breitbarted”, and the press ate it up just a greedily as they did with the Sherrod affair. It's time to stop giving right-wing hate speech the benefit of the doubt in the MSM.
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p>And the actual PARENTS of said children ask – where the HELL do you get off doing condom instruction with my kid? What makes you think it’s OK to violate my child’s privacy like that? Why not raise your OWN child, and let me raise mine?
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p>We don’t have time in the school curriculum to teach CIVICS, but we CAN teach condom use and prayer rug use….
Because, for one thing, the public interest demands it. Same with making sure kids know what drugs and alcohol can do to you, that smoking causes cancer, and that using condoms can help prevent pregnancy and STD’s. If you ask me, we should also teach kids about budgeting and credit cards. Society, and the kids themselves, would be better off if students learned about all of those things, whether parents like it or not.
My daughter is in grade school, and is being taught all of those things. What school system does not?
I see this whole sorry episode as yet another example MSM “branding” of Muslims-are-awful in an election year.
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p>The game is to raise the profile of anti-Muslim ferver among an already out-of-control society. The intent is to pander to the xenophobia and bigotry of the audience. It is no accident that this comes from the religious right, and no accident that the MSM encourages it.
As 9/11 starts to fade a little in people’s memories, and as we finally start to disengage from Iraq, I think it benefits the right far more than the left to stir up these kinds of feelings. It can’t hurt to change the subject from income disparities, bloated bank CEO’s, increasing poverty, etc.