Reality, as usual, is stuck somewhere between everyone’s perceptions of it.

Immigration is an issue fraught with this trait.

The cultural left believes that America has always been an uneasy truce between incompatible cultures, held together only by the grace of government.

The cultural right believes that until recently, America was a melting-pot rather than a quilt; a place where people (other than the odd bit of pride in their heritage) stripped away the old to embrace the new.

The truth, naturally, is somewhere in between (even if, as usual, somewhere to the right of dead-center).  Not everyone assimilated instantly to the New World.  My maternal grandmother and my ex-father-in-law both grew up speaking other languages – Norwegian and German, respectively.  More globally, many ethnic groups – most notably the Italians of New York and Boston – actively resisted assimilating in the mid-1800s, keeping their language and their customs and the hope of making some money and moving back to the Old Country sooner than later.  Others – the Irish then, some Central Americans now – were similar if not the same.

So it’s not a huge surprise that some people coming from a very foreign cultural tradition and a society little-advanced since the seventh century, might not dive into American culture head-first.

What’s distressing is that so many Americans – too many – are actively facilititating this; creating an America of many cultures that intersect only where they absolutely have to.

 Katherine Kersten in the Strib, in the second part of a great two-part series on MCTC‘s effort to install Moslem-friendly facilties, and the agenda behind the move:

Last week, I wrote about Minneapolis Community and Technical College, which is planning to install facilities to help Muslim students perform ritual washing before daily prayers. It’s a simple matter of extending “hospitality” to newcomers, says President Phil Davis — no different than providing a fish option in the college cafeteria for Christian students during Lent… [But] On the [College’s Muslim Accomodations Task Force website] , I found information about the handful of public colleges that have “wudu,” or ritual bathing, facilities.

Now, a conservative – or one that believes in separation of church and state, no matter what their politics – might be tempted to ask “what allowances do public colleges make for Christians?”  Of course, modern Christianity is pretty low-impact as far as public affordances go; most of us can pray in private if we’re so inclined, and can save our public observances for church. 

Islam, traditionally, is different – although Moslems around the world do get allowances for interacting with modernity.  Should they want them.

Which is the big qualification.  I’ll add emphasis below:

But I also discovered something more important for colleges seeking guidance on “accommodations”: Projects like MCTC’s are likely to be the first step in a long process.

The task force’s eventual objectives on American campuses include the following, according to the website: permanent Muslim prayer spaces, ritual washing facilities, separate food and housing for Muslim students, separate hours at athletic facilities for Muslim women, paid imams or religious counselors, and campus observance of Muslim holidays. The task force is already hailing “pioneering” successes. At Syracuse University in New York, for example, “Eid al Fitr is now an official university holiday,” says an article featured on the website. “The entire university campus shuts down to mark the end of Ramadan.” At Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., “halal” food — ritually slaughtered and permissible under Islamic law — is marked by green stickers in the cafeteria and “staff are well-trained in handling practices.”

At Georgetown University, Muslim women can live apart in housing that enables them to “sleep in an Islamic setting,” as the website puts it. According to a student at the time the policy was adopted, the university housing office initially opposed the idea, on grounds that all freshman should have the experience of “living in dorms and dealing with different kinds of people.” That might sound appealing, Muslim students told a reporter in an article featured on the website. But in their view, the reporter wrote, “learning to live with ‘different kinds of people’ ” actually “causes more harm than good” for Muslims, because it requires them to live in an environment that “distracts them from their desire to become better Muslims, and even draw[s] weaker Muslims away from Islam.”

In some of these cases, I don’t see a huge problem; in areas where Moslems are a significant part of the population (like Dearborn), the market will drive these things, just as Catholics in the market drive cafeterias to serve fish on Fridays.  As to holidays – well, at a private school (like Syracuse and Georgetown), it’s really up to the buyer to decide if they want Eid off; when I was in college, during some of my tougher semesters, I’d have taken Cthulhian holidays if could’ve gotten ’em.

For that matter, if private schools want to invest in prayer spaces and separate facilities for Moslems because it’s just-plain good marketing, more power to ’em. 

But at public schools?  I don’t want tax money going toward separate-but-equal capital expenditures for anyone’s religion, even my own!

Read the rest of Kersten’s piece, which goes into great depth about the agitation for these changes.

My NARN colleague Ed Morrissey writes: Ed Morrissey writes:

In other words, what we will get from this process of multiculturalism is precisely the kind of “separate but equal” facilities struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education in 1954. These Muslim activists want to create a separate society within the United States for Muslims, and they want the US to provide them the facilities with which to create it. Separate dorms, separate cafeterias, Muslim-only physical-education classes — they want a separate Muslim college at MCTC and everywhere else. It’s self-initiated apartheid.

Forty years ago and more, we had segregationists insisting that different peoples could not live within the same area without dividing lines…Now we have Muslims who want to reopen the argument in order to create a closed society for themselves within the US. We have no problem with Muslims who integrate into our society and become Americans in deed as well as in name. If Muslims want to open their own universities to ensure the proper exercise of their religion, well, that works too…We do not need religious apartheid at MCTC or any other public university or facility. If devout Muslims do not want to integrate into American society, then they need to find another place to live. Period.

That is, of course, the larger danger; that a significant part of our society will get the means to segregate itself…

…with the active connivance of too many “well-meaning” Americans.