The problem here is not just that state schools shouldn’t be fussing around with particular religions and their rules and fasts, though of course it is that. It’s also, frankly, that state schools (or for that matter any schools) shouldn’t be helping to implement rules and fasts that are fundamentally unhealthy and unsafe. It’s a really bad idea to forbid hydration for extended periods (such as dawn to dusk), so schools should at least abstain. They shouldn’t anxiously help religions to enforce stupid dangerous “rules” of that kind. That’s not their job, and it’s a dereliction of their responsibility for the students’ safety while on the premises.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council has issued an 11-page Ramadan guide for schools to help

Ann Widdecombe explains it all to the New Statesman.

 Under the last government we saw a raft of law, principally equality law, which specifically set out to crush religious freedom and to crush freedom of conscience. There is an immense difference between being told that you must not discriminate against something and being told that you must promote it.

Like what, the NS asks. Poofters, of course. Poofter adoptions, poofters in your B&B. Half the population are non-believers, the NS says feebly; not a bit of it, says Widdecombe, most are Christians and what they say goes. No, really, the NS bleats; Widdecombe says not at all.

People may say they’re not religious, and when Richard Dawkins says he’s

Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl says it’s not that the church disrespects women. Oh fuck no, said the chair of the US bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, the church thinks women are just lovely.

Noting that women hold a variety of church leadership positions in parishes and dioceses, Archbishop Wuerl said, “The church’s gratitude toward women cannot be stated strongly enough.”

“Women offer unique insight, creative abilities and unstinting generosity at the very heart of the Catholic Church,” he said.

They have that there women’s intuition, and they’re so creative with the flowers and the packed lunches and the…the flowers, and the generosity just never quits, they give us all their money and a lot of the time they let us … Read the rest