How about if it was another religious book? Say the Koran?
The NYT has what seems meant to read as a charming human interest piece about "children" — really, boys — who are sent to school in New York City for 9 hours a day to work exclusively on the task of memorizing the Koran.
But this level of devotion to Islam has a way of causing suspicion these days. While parents whose children are in the schools said they were proud of them, they also worry about how they will be perceived.
How they will be perceived? This isn't a matter of stimulating the supposed ethnic prejudice of Americans, it's blatantly violating the laws of compulsory schooling!
The young boys are taught that if they memorize the entire Koran, they will gain admittance to heaven and the right to choose 10 persons to bring along with them. If believed, this is a powerful incentive. There is a sense that the entire family is relying on him. Meanwhile, these boys — who must be quite smart to have a shot at memorizing the 6,200 verses — are deprived of all other education, including instruction in Arabic, the language of the text they are memorizing phonetically. (Nor are they provided with a translation: they are learning only to pronounce sounds.)
This is nothing but rote memorization without even the most rudimentary attempt to teach what the sounds they are repeating actually mean. Go read the rest of what Ann Althouse has to say about this.
This is something that has been troubling me of late. There is this mantra, this core belief among many that all cultures have to be respected. All are equal. The so-called multiculturalism. Yet that acceptance does not extend to Christianity. A school that does not even meet the basic requirements under the law for teaching is allowed to flourish because it teaches the Koran. Would the same be allowed if they substituted the bible?
There is a reluctance to apply basic standards that are written into the law because of ethnic, religious or cultural concerns. All in the name of multicultural tolerance. Why? Who defends this behavior. Who enables it? Who looks the other way when blatant violations of society's laws are flaunted. Why are we tolerant of behavior such as this? Why does the New York Times run approving stories of this while writing very disapproving stories about those who choose to believe in intelligent design? Is this not a very obvious double standard?
Isn't it time we stopped the double standards within our own country and in the world in general?