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Michael Ruse has a new piece up at the Chronicle. It?s called ?Prayer, Menstruation, and the Toronto District School Board,? and deals with the permission given by the Toronto District School Board to provide opportunities for Muslim children to pray at the right times during the day. Only this time, as Ruse says, people have gone a bit too far. Prayers that are attended by Muslims segregated girls who are menstruating to the back of the room. And Ruse is justly outraged. As he says:

It turns out that girls who are menstruating are not allowed to participate in the prayers.? They must sit at the back and watch.? This is not a social demand.? This is a religious demand.

It is also absolutely outrageous.? Let me spell it out.? Girls with their periods are not sinful.? They are not sick.? They are not weak.? That anyone would think otherwise in this day and age boggles the mind.? It boggles the mind even more that respectable members of the Toronto District School Board should think this treatment of females is something that should be tolerated on school grounds, at any time.

Michael Ruse is not the only one outraged. Terek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress says (in the Toronto Sun):

But by allowing prayer sessions to continue, says one of the more moderate voices in the Muslim community, the TDSB is going against the Ontario Education Act, the legislation that governs the province?s school system.

?The TDSB, by allowing the propagation of religion, is going against the education act,? Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said on Friday. ?(The act) says no religion can be propagated in the public school system.?

And the separating of boys and girls during the prayer sessions?

The TDSB?has taken one of the more radical and patriarchal forms of Islam,? run with it, and hasn?t bothered to question it, Fatah said. ?How did the TDSB pick the worst form of gender separation and say this is Islam?? Fatah asked. ?The TDSB is guilty of importing a version of Islam that is from?Islamic fascists.?

And this?is simply why religion does not belong in?public space, because there is no way of establishing what is and what is not an aspect or teaching or practice of any particular religion.

But the reason is even more basic than that. Muslims may have to pray five times a day if they are going to be devout. I have no comment to make about this. But religion and its peccadilloes does not belong in the public sphere at all. If they want to sanctify time then they are going to?have to work?around?the secular nature of society. Religion does not have a right to interfere with others, and attempt to impose on others the structure of sanctity that is demanded by their religion. Nor should?religions ? no matter which ones?? pretend to the kind of holiness and difference that these practices demand in public institutions like schools, universities, hospitals, and other public and secular dimensions of society. Religion is something that people have a right to practice their religion in private. They may even segregate people according to their beliefs in private, but to the?extent that a religion is practiced publicly, they have no right to impose the order of their religion upon the society in which they are only a part, no matter how numerous.

People tell us that we should not be worried about Islam, because real?Muslims are peaceful people,?hard-working as well as devout, and that their way of life can fit in?well with the secular society around them. Well, maybe, though I see absolutely no evidence for this claim?as yet. There is always a fringe group which demands greater recognition and more elastic provisions for the practice?of their religion. We are, at long last, beginning to liberate ourselves from the bondage of Christianity, which imposed its own sacred order on the holidays we observe, but at least no one thinks anymore than they should be able to fence Sunday off from the other days of the week. The?same goes for Islam. If they must pray five times a day, they must learn ways to work around the secular order of society. They have no business making demands that time be sanctified by disrupting classes or imposing their antediluvian idiocies on the rest of society. It?s bad enough separating themselves from others five times a day to carry out their religious devotions. These should be strictly private affairs. But it is completely unacceptable that they should be permitted to make gender distinctions based on the fact that girls?are experiencing the absolutely natural process of menstruation.

The time is coming when we are going to have to take the bull by the horns and tell religions that they simply must live up to the?understanding of equality that is written into the laws of the land. The free exercise of religion should only be allowed to be practiced in concordance with charters of rights and freedoms and other legal mechanisms intended to protect equality and freedom. That means that the Roman Catholic Church must permit women in ministry, and why every religion must acknowledge the rights and dignity of gay people. To the extent that they refuse such accommodations to the values on which democratic?and free societies are based, to that extent they should be shunned and humiliated as institutions to which any self-respecting persons should associate themselves. It seems to me that it takes too much to arouse Ruse?s outrage. We should all be much more outraged than we are.

?

[This was written in haste before I hurry away for the day. I hope I do not repent at leisure!]

Source: http://choiceindying.com/2011/07/16/on-the-side-of-the-angels/

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