"Freedom of Religion" --> Do 'other' religions count?

From the great state of Louisiana, we have a heart-warming story of religious tolerance.  For those of you who don't know, Governor Bobby Jindal (who probably has the world record for the shortest time in the Presidential Candidate limelight after his EPIC FIAL of a State of the Union response in 2009) signed a school voucher bill allowing parents to send kids to private schools at public expense, regardless of the type of school, i.e., religious, etc.

Sounds great right? Especially the bit about public money paying for sending kids to religious schools? (work w/ me here).

Well, turns out that Rep. Valarie Hodges (R-Watson) is having second thoughts. Turned out that when she voted for the bill, she had mistakenly assumed that religious meant Christian :-(
According to her
'I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,' 
'Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion.  We need to insure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.'
Oh, the humanity! The humanity!
Who could have possibly thought that people might actually take this whole Religious Freedom thing to actually mean anything other than Christian Freedom? Man, the founders really screwed up that bit, by not being specific, right?

Incidentally, where did she get thousand Muslim schools from? Some google searching shows that there are - at most, around 300 private muslim schools in the US, which, even accounting for funny Louisiana math, doesn't add up to 1000 in Louisiana...



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cannonball Tree!

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)