Decrying publicly funded Islamic education in Minnesota
An investigative reporter out in Minnesota has uncovered a publicly funded Muslim charter school that is promoting the religion of Islam on the publics dime. The charter school is collocated with a mosque, and all students go over for “voluntary” prayer and Islamic education immediately after school, after the ritual washing of hands and feet, of course. As if all this didn’t make the religious nature of the school obvious enough, the building the school is located in is also the headquarters of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is to “establish Islam in Minnesota.”
This is a clear violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. No public funds should be going towards promoting any particular religion, especially not to a captive child audience. It doesn’t matter that attending the school is entirely voluntary (for the parents, anyway; the children likely have no say in the matter). It’s entirely unconstitutional. Minnesota hasn’t been doing a good job of regulating this school, having only visited it thrice in the past five years. All manner of illegal things have been going on right under their noses.
It is the state’s duty to provide a secular education. Any promotion of religion should not take place in public schools. I wonder what in the world Minnesota was thinking when they established a separate public school just for Muslims; how is this justified or appropriate?! America has always been a melting pot. Our strategy is to assimilate immigrants into our culture, and schools are the best way to do that. So establishing a separate school to prevent that assimilation, and then promote religion on top of that, is absurd. Just like we have no public schools that promote Christianity, there should be none that promote any other religion.
I think we’re heading down the very dangerous road of the British and the French who, in the name of “cultural diversity”, are allowing large segments of their population to remain isolated and cut off. In Britain they even allow Muslim men with multiple wives to get government benefits for each wife — so long as he married them before immigrating! And this is even though bigamy is illegal for all other British citizens. The results of this kind of appeasement of immigrants are devastating: witness the large Muslim immigrant riots in the banlieues of Paris in recent years, leaving thousands of cars torched, hundreds of police officers injured, and millions in damages. Or look at the extremist imams in Britain who actively preach hate and condone violence against “heathens”, providing the breeding grounds for such plots as the July 7 London bombings.
So far, America has done much better. We don’t have the problem of home-grown terrorists like the United Kingdom because we’ve purposefully liberalized and integrated our immigrants into our culture. Children who receive a secular modern education generally do not grow up to be extremists. So we shouldn’t be shooting ourselves in the foot here and using taxpayer money to subsidize non-secular education that only serves to actively prevent assimilation and could potentially foster more extremism down the line. Our current strategy is working; don’t deviate from it! Get rid of all public schools that segregate out children by religion. There’s absolutely no place for it in America.
April 9th, 2008 at 22:04
You might be interested in the breaking story here in Chicagoland about how atheism is dangerous to children.
April 9th, 2008 at 22:06
Oh, trust me Kelly, I heard all about that story. It was one of the largest comments threads I’ve seen on Daily Kos in a long while. I just, uh, neglected to blog about it, since everyone else was talking about it at the time. It seemed redundant. But yeah, Rep. Monique Davis should be driven out on the rails for that. We have no use for such bigotry in our government, especially considering how large of a minority atheists now are.