Religious schools in the UK can now legally discriminate

We’ve come a long way over the past 100 years, but do you ever feel like we’re slowly starting to slide backwards when you hear about stuff like this?

Leading academics, authors and scientists are launching a campaign to stop state-funded faith schools from discriminating against students and teachers on the grounds of religion.

From Monday, such schools will be allowed to include faith as a selection criterion for teaching and non-teaching posts, reserving more places for people from the same religious background.

In some schools this will expand to include the headteacher while in others this would apply to non-teaching jobs, such as classroom assistants and cooks.

In 2006 faith schools were handed new powers to discriminate when Lord Adonis, the schools minister, brought forward an amendment to the education bill allowing them to favour members of the same religion when choosing support staff. Shortly afterwards the education secretary, Alan Johnson, said he would no longer try to force faith schools to accept up to a quarter of their pupils from other faiths or with no religion. The climbdown infuriated those who claim single faith schools fuel ethnic, religious and social segregation.

Earlier this year the National Union of Teachers unveiled plans to rival faith schools, proposing that all schools should become practising multi-faith institutions. Headteachers would bring in imams, rabbis and priests to instruct religious pupils as part of the curriculum in an attempt to satisfy parental demand for religion in schools.

Why is there a push to include more faith in schools? Leave faith to families and education to the educators.

Elections, religion, and the separation of Church and State

You’re probably going to be seeing a lot more posts relating to religion and American politics, since the two seem to have become hopelessly tangled together lately. Welton Gaddy explains some of the base rules surrounding religion and elections, and talks about the importance of keeping things separate:

The leader we choose may have a faith of his own, but he must lead members of all faiths present in the nation - as well as those with no faith at all. The Constitution forbids the legal enshrinement of anyone’s religious beliefs, so voters need to know how candidates are prepared to translate their beliefs into policy statements based on universal values.

Those of us who speak of electoral guidelines and advocate adherence to boundaries between institutional religion and partisan politics do so not as stuffy legalists wishing to mute all religious language or pour cold water on the white hot excitement of devotees of a particular candidate.

We call for attentiveness to the proper role of religion in campaigns as thankful citizens who know the importance of religion in a society and recognize in democracy our best hope as a nation.

Insistence on the proper role of religion in the life of the nation is essential–a non-negotiable–for the good of religion, for the constitutional protection of non-religious people, and for the vitality of democracy.

Howard Dean talks democratic faith

Republicans aren’t the only ones dragging faith and religion deeper into the American political landscape. Here’s DNC head Howard Dean talking about the Democratic party’s attempt to “increase its displays of religiosity”:

“Faith is faith,” he exclaimed. “Faith in God is something that is common to human beings.”

He was quick to acknowledge that secular people in the Democratic Party “still have values.”

Dean suggested that the diversity of the Democratic Party is one reason it does not address faith in the same way as Republicans, whom he accused of talking about a “mono-religious country.”

“In this party, we have other values that matter to us. We talk about respecting everybody’s faith,” he asserted.

“Jews and Muslims matter a lot in our party.”

He also said that all religions could overcome their differences to support a broader American vision.

Town split over teacher who burned crosses into students’ arms

From MSNBC.com

Demonstrations on the town square show how divided people are over the school board’s decision to fire a science teacher accused of preaching his Christian beliefs in the classroom and burning crosses on students’ arms.

John Freshwater, 52, was fired last month after an outside consulting firm released a report concluding that he taught creationism and was insubordinate in failing to remove a Bible and other religious materials from his classroom at Mount Vernon Middle School.

Some residents consider him a courageous fighter for religious freedom. Others say he has brazenly violated the church-state divide.

Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded

Personally I’m not really a fan of Christopher Hitchens so I enjoyed this a little too much:

Late last year, the writer, polemicist and fierce proponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq Christopher Hitchens attempted, in a piece for the online magazine Slate, to draw a distinction between what he called techniques of “extreme interrogation” and “outright torture”.

From this, his foes inferred that since it was Hitchens’ belief that America did not stoop to the latter, the practice of waterboarding - known to be perpetrated by US forces against certain “high-value clients” in Iraq and elsewhere - must fall under the former heading.

Enraged by what they saw as an exercise in elegant but offensive sophistry, some of the writer’s critics suggested that Hitchens give waterboarding (which may sound like some kind of fun aquatic pastime, but is probably best summarised as enforced partial drowning) a whirl, just to see what it was like. Did the experience feel like torture?

And amazingly, he has done just that.

Exorcism is protected by law

From MSNBC”

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday threw out a jury award over injuries a 17-year-old girl suffered in an exorcism conducted by members of her old church, ruling that the case unconstitutionally entangled the court in religious matters.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices found that a lower court erred when it said the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God’s First Amendment rights regarding freedom of religion did not prevent the church from being held liable for mental distress triggered by a “hyper-spiritualistic environment.”