[Conscience of a Conservative]

Back in my day, there were quite a few Jewish students in my school. On Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana(sp?), they were absent. Nobody made demands that the school close to accomodate their religion. Why do we need to bend over backwards to appease Islam in this manner? To prove how liberal we are?

I agree, but the Jewish holidays are not a great example in this case - Montgomery County schools are closed for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (which fell on a Saturday this year).

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

In the old, real world, a number of schools were closed for Jewish holidays in the major cities (mine was Baltimore), because Jewish students and staff constituted the majority in some neighborhood.

Some schools were open but more for catch-up time.

Nobody died, no one went crazy. The city schools were closed for Christmas and I believe some were closed for Good Friday (or had excused absences).

This was a time when Jews and Christians had pretty good relations, esp. in the school systems, where administrators, principals and staff were able to work out reasonable accomodations for each religious group.

Today, “diversity” has destroyed this long-time balance but as one commentor postulated, each religious group could ask for the schools to be closed on their most holy holidays (and their rationale would be correct).

The old recognized “excused absences” technique would resolve all these problems without interferring with anyone’s religious practicies.

Heck. One of my classmates (and his friends), took off for Greek Christmas (Greek Orthodox - it helps when your father is the head of the local church). We thought that it was “cool” because we didn’t know much about Greek Orthodoxy and why they went by a different calendar. But we learned, and had respect for them.

Now, one of my classmates, in a truly early effort to promote “diversity”, took off for Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur, Christmas, Greek Christmas, and Chinese New Years.

Unfortunately we were a few years too early to celebrate Vietnamese New Year “Tet”, and the fake holiday of Kwanza (why anyone made a holiday to celebrate a Kwanzset Hut is beyond me).

Otherwise, Phil would have joyfully celebrated them too in the spirit of universal brotherhood and taking another day off from school.

As for CAIR, who CARES? They are Islamic jihadist subversives and should be treated as such. But with Marxist O’Malley in charge of Maryland, you never know whether he will order a “surrender” to this religious fanatics. The same for the governorship ambitious Doug Gansler.

In Maryland, the “M” could stand for “Moslem”.