Friday, November 30, 2007

Government Support of a Religion?

For years the ACLU and other similar anti-Christian organizations have spent millions of dollars trying to eliminate God and religion from our society, with varying degrees of success. They fought against any kind of accommodation for Christians in particular, claiming that anything any governmental agency did that might be an accommodation of Christians was an unconstitutional establishment or endorsement of a particular religion. See my earlier posts for an explanation of how the courts have grossly misinterpreted the First Amendment since 1947.

Now we have two interesting situations regarding Islam. One is the establishment of a public school in New York City that is dedicated to teaching Arabic language and culture. Since the dominant religion in the Arab world is Islam, isn’t the City of New York favoring a particular religion? When Bible studies can’t meet in public schools after school, when Christians can’t pray in public schools, when Christmas is obliterated from public schools, when children who write essays on their faith are penalized, now NYC is setting up a school that would appear to promote Islam? I say “promote Islam” because you can’t separate Islam from Arab culture – they are totally intertwined and inseparable. I guess NYC takes separation of “Church” and State literally, and does not consider the Mosque in that category. What NYC doesn’t realize is that the word “Church” isn’t in the constitution, only the word “religion”.

Along the same lines, some public school (I can’t remember where) is either planning to, or already has, installed Islamic foot washing basins to provide Muslim students with the proper way to ritually wash before prayer. This seems like a nice idea, but again, Christians have been prohibited from any kind of religious activity in public schools, including after school (these prohibitions have been challenged and subsequently reversed by courts as an unconstitutional interference with the practice of religion).

Providing such Islamic religious facilities, no matter how innocuous, is like a public school giving rosaries to Catholic students and then giving them time off to say the rosary during school hours. That would never happen! So why is Islam being accommodated by a governmental agency and all other religions are not?

What we are seeing is a double-standard. Accommodating Christians in any way is endorsing religion, but doing the same things for Muslims isn’t. Why is Islam so politically correct and Christianity (and Judaism) aren’t? I don’t understand this mentality. I’m not arguing that Muslims shouldn’t be accommodated in some ways, but then there has to be a reversal of all the discrimination that takes place against Christians. Otherwise all religions aren’t being treated the same, which is then a de facto establishment of a religion.

Please pray for this nation, which is going down so many wrong paths that I fear for its future. Watch for a future post about anti-Semitism.

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