Religious Freedom FAIL

Seriously, did anyone in the Toronto District School Board think that forcing girls to sit behind boys for school-sanctioned prayer sessions might be a bad idea?

A largely Muslim Toronto public school's practice of hosting Friday afternoon prayer sessions in the school's cafeteria, instead of letting them leave the property to pray at a nearby mosque, has raised concerns that it's treating boys and girls unfairly. The Globe and Mail's editorialists rightly condemn Valley Park Middle School's administrators for “[challenging] dominant ideas of equality” by separating the boys from girls during the sessions, as is common practice in mosques the world over. “Public schools need to safeguard their essential universalism in which no hierarchy exists, and no privilege is owed to one and not another,” they write. Doing so in the name of religious freedom only tarnishes that cherished right, and if the students' parents are so concerned about their kids adhering to their faith's terms and conditions, they ought to find a school that can do so that doesn't use taxpayer dollars.

The Toronto Star's Heather Mallick hammers the school's administrators for taking that separation policy even further, forcing girls on their period to sit behind those who aren't, who are already behind the boys. “The girls at this school aren’t toughened for ridicule, which is only part of the reason I hate their being singled out for a female function we are still learning to discuss openly in the modern West,” writes Mallick, at whom we often poke fun but can't praise enough for this column. “Why not just make them wear a hat with a big arrow or a flag?” she asks, after wondering why she was the first commentator to raise the menstruation separation question. That girls as young as 11 are being forced to indicate they're on their period for the sake of religious freedom is abhorrent and must be ended immediately.

At least some wiser minds, notably the Muslim Canadian Congress, are trying to rectify this, notes Tasha Kheiriddin in the National Post. The MCC says there's no absolute rule for segregating men from women during prayer, and that Friday prayers aren't even mandatory. If they follow through with a plan to sue the Toronto District School Board into either amending or ending the prayer sessions, the MCC can almost be assured victory. Kheiriddin brings up the landmark case, Zyblerberg vs. Sudbury Board of Education, which ended the practice of public school students reciting the Lord's Prayer each morning. “The current practice at Valley Park violates the rights of not only non-Muslim students, who must give over their cafeteria space to another religion,” says Kheiriddin, “but Muslim students who don’t share this particular way of practicing Islam.” All told, there is not a single good reason why these prayer sessions should be allowed to continue as is. Worries about students skipping classes if they leave school grounds to pray pale next to this utter compromise of equality. A letter to parents telling them to get their kids back to class after a trip to the mosque would be infinitely more sensible.