Seperation Of Church And State?

Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Great Canadian disgraces

The perils of conflict-avoidance

Every last word of Heather Mallick‘s second column in the Toronto Star on Toronto’s public-school-cum-mosque is dead on, and we hope she and others keep writing about it until the adults involved realize, in a moment of horror, the insane situation their good intentions have created: Segregation of boys and girls, and further segregation of menstruating girls, while they pray (nor not, in the case of menstruating girls), during class time, in a public school cafeteria, in Canada, in 2011. If you saw a golden lab puppy on fire, you’d be utterly desperate to put it out. That’s roughly the sort of motivation school administrators should be feeling right now to ensure this doesn’t start happening again in September.

Mallick takes particularly effective umbrage at the fact this solution was devised partly because some students apparently weren’t coming back from mosque on Friday afternoons. “This is a disciplinary matter, not a religious one,” she writes. “I’m hoping that girls and boys were at least doing their pointless Friday mall-lounging in each other’s company. Maybe they learned something that a lazy frightened school was unwilling to teach them: how to get along.” Ka-pow!

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Mallick: Some Toronto schoolgirls are always second-rate

Almost every detail concerning Friday prayers at Valley Park Middle School is a slap at female dignity. (93)

My school prayer

How my Friday ritual made me a Muslim feministBy Fathima Cader

During the Ramadan of my final year at Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute – across the street from Valley Park Middle School, the scene of much media scrutiny last week – things suddenly changed.

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