The Strib takes a whack at Katherine Kersten, and at all of you who take umbrage at Minneapolis Community Technical College’s investigation into installing foot baths for Moslem students:<\/p>\n
Minneapolis Community and Technical College has been bombarded with letters and e-mails — most of them hostile, some of them hateful — since disclosing that it is considering the installation of a foot bath for some Muslim students to use before prayer. This reaction is out of proportion to the modest and cautious inquiry the school has undertaken, and it is certainly out of keeping with Minnesota’s long tradition of social tolerance and temperate thinking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Actually, it’d be out of keeping with Institutional Minnesota’s traditional self-glorifying view of itself.\u00a0 Minnesota has plenty of racist skeletons in its closet, from the Duluth lynchings to the Russell Shimooka affair.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the downtown Minneapolis school were discriminating in favor of Islam and against other faiths, we would understand the outrage. But it’s not. When Christian students asked for space to study the Bible and conduct prayers, the school obliged them. When a Jewish student asked to reschedule an assignment because of a religious observance, the college agreed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Small interpersonal affordances are fine – and different.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Strib Editorial Board should ask itself “if a Catholic, Protestant or Jewish group asked MCTC for a capital expenditure<\/em> to modify a building to be more congruent with their <\/em>religious practices, how far do they think it’d get?<\/p>\n
They seem to have learned “logic” from the Minnesota Monitor:<\/p>\n
And so the school found itself wading into that murky question of what the Constitution’s “establishment clause” permits and forbids. In our view it has handled that question appropriately. Banning Christmas carols on the official campus coffee cart — which incensed the school’s critics — seems plainly in keeping with a long string of court rulings that forbid the use of public resources to endorse a particular religion. But accommodating the prayer practices of some devout Muslims seems akin to putting kosher items on the cafeteria menu and letting employees display religious objects in their private workspaces — accommodations that MCTC has in fact made in the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Surely even the Strib editorial board isn’t this dumb?\u00a0 Is it?<\/p>\n
Kosher food on the cafeteria menu, while a Jewish stricture, is not purely religious; I, a goy<\/em>, seek out kosher food in many areas.\u00a0 And the fact that any official body nosed into the privately-funded, privately displayed stuff on a worker’s desk is downright Orwellian.<\/p>\n
Now – do you think the foot bath is going to be a community facility?\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Minnesota will be a stronger state if it tackles these questions in a spirit of generosity and confidence — and who wouldn’t be confident when the state’s schools are full of pious, ambitious young people who are trying to get a college education?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Unless they’re Christians or Jews, apparently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Strib takes a whack at Katherine Kersten, and at all of you who take umbrage at Minneapolis Community Technical College’s investigation into installing foot baths for Moslem students: Minneapolis Community and Technical College has been bombarded with letters and e-mails — most of them hostile, some of them hateful — since disclosing that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}