Religion should not even be included in the curriculum and be he held totally outside the schools because it is private and personal.  Let the parents and religions take all responsibility for that teaching and spending.

Phys Ed is a necessary rounding in education and the exemption should be for health reasons only.  It´s hard to imagine any negative effects of healthy group exercise, performing as well, or as clumsily as the rest.

Sex Ed should not be optional in the 21st century, whether it is part of biology, or by itself.

The current right wing battle in Spain is against the newly approved ´Civics´ course.  The PP and the bishops are against it because ´it´s not moral´:  it teaches tolerance to different sexualities, family types, etc.  I wish it were mandatory for everyone in the country.  Retroactively.

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

A worse scenario, and I don't know if this is entirely possible, would be the removal of the children from the state education system. Either through the establishment of independent schools which cater to their religious need, or through a growth in home-schooling. This division or partition of certain sections of the community from mixing with another would be a disasterous outcome, and probably not worth forcing the issue over.

PS: What does LQD mean? I keep seeing it everywhere, and feel I must ask, cause I can't figure it out.

Member of the Anti-Fabulousness League since 1987.

The secondary schools, where PE has always been mostly single-sex, have simply adapted their required PE uniform to meet Muslim standards of modesty.

In practice, this means that short-skirts-with-matching-knickers are out, and tracksuit bottoms in.

As mother to a teenage girl, I'd count this as a positive result all round.  There was a report recently (which I now can't find) that concluded that girls of all ethnicities are far more likely to turn up for sport if they're allowed to wear comfortable and non-embarrassing clothes.  Well, duh.  

But hey, looking though on immigrants has payed of before!

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

Variation on the theme of the veil in school and public institutions; it's ultimately an equality issue, with indivual rights of the women taking precedence over the collective rights of the minority community in which she, as a young woman, likely has no real choice but to belong to.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

WESTON -- An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.

"She got sicker and sicker until she was dead," he said.

Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said.

[snip]

"They are still in the home," he said. "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

The girl's death remains under investigation and the findings will be forwarded to the district attorney to review for possible charges, the chief said.

S 948.03(6) : Treatment through prayer. A person is not guilty of an offense under this section solely because he or she provides a child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone for healing in accordance with the religious method of healing permitted under s. 48.981 (3) (c) 4. or 448.03 (6) in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.

In fact, let us just not end here. Sexual education should exist in priesthood school and, more importantly, religions who deny their priests the right to a normal sexuality should lose and privileges, namely the right to own or use mass communication media or special tax regimes. Including same-sex partnerships.
Zoophilia could acceptable in certain cases, such as doves or lambs to Christian priests (or nuns).

It is not only little children whose rights are being denied. We must end medieval tortures such as the imposition of chastity on priesthood.

Hmmm, that's funny, now that i think about, i don't remember ever seeing a list on my local church of all Jewish people condemned to the death by fire in past centuries; as for the Muslims, they even didn't bother to record their names. They should cover the walls with those names. Even the cross. Now that would be tolerance.

Nothing that i may say here can be as surreal as the acceptance of the history of pain imposed on our fellow man, generation after generation, by those who lost their humanity on their vassalage to a god, or gods, who probably could not even make a good soup.

My area of the world was devastated. F'ked up. Seven hundred fifty and something years ago, five hundred and something years ago, and a little bit every year, every moment happiness was denied to someone.