Posted on 01/30/2016 7:02:48 AM PST by HomerBohn
The parents of a Maryland teenager are suing their daughter's high school over a world history lesson they claim was little more than Islamic indoctrination.
The Thomas More Law Center filed a lawsuit against La Plata High School on behalf of John and Melissa Wood, claiming the lesson favored a "sugar-coated version of Islam" over other religions and forced their 16-year-old child "to disparage her Christian faith," according to the law firm.
The parents said the class spent one day on Christianity, followed by two weeks on Islam.
And the 11th grader was "forced to profess and to write out the Shahada in worksheets and quizzes," the firm said.
"The Shahada is the Islamic Creed, 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.' For non-Muslims, reciting the statement is sufficient to convert one to Islam."
Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, said the favoritism did not stop there.
"The course also taught false statements such as Allah is the same God worshiped by Christians and Islam is a 'religion of peace,'" he said in court documents.
Thompson said "such discriminatory treatment of Christianity is an unconstitutional promotion of one religion over another."
According to the suit, the class was told "the Islamic religion is a fact while Christianity and Judaism are just beliefs," and were not allowed to opt out of the lesson on the basis of religious beliefs.
Wood was told his daughter would receive a zero if she didn't complete the assignments.
The Thomas More Law Center said the Wood family, who are Christians, "chose to remain faithful to God and refused to complete the assignments, even though failing grades would harm her future admission to college and her opportunities to obtain college scholarships."
Adding insult to injury, the father, a Marine veteran who was deployed in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, was banned from school grounds after he complained, according to the suit.
Charles County Schools released a statement about the world history class, insisting that "other religions are introduced when they influence or impact a particular historical era or geographic region."
"The particular unit in question is on the formation of Middle Eastern empires in which students learned the basic concepts of the Islamic faith and how it, along with politics, culture, economics and geography, contributed to the development of the Middle East," the school district said in the statement.
“suing their daughter’s high school”
The part not mentioned, he is suing the officials personally too. I don’t know the laws in Md at all but if what they did is beyond their scope of employment in the district, they indeed could be personally liable in some states.
If he were truly Christian don't ya'll think he would be promoting Christianity?
Hold the door!! What the heck is the president of the US doing promoting one religion one another??
As long as we parents/property owners are w/o recourse but to pay tuition err... I mean taxes that support public education that has little to no accountability to the tax payers, it is best to suffer the costs of private or home school education.
We did. It cost us about twice as much as the parents next door who sent their off spring to the public domain. They were worth it.
Every public school student should subscribe to the daily American Minute to learn the truth about our nation. http://americanminute.com/
THIS IS WHAT THE TEACHERS SHOULD BE TEACHING!
“What Every America Needs to Know About the Quranâ€Â
American Historian William Federer explains Islam through a short presentation with charts, the progression of Islam dominance.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?314071-10/book-discussion-every-american-needs-know-quran&buy=&start=12
This lawsuit is a farce. This public school is not trying to convert kids to islam or disparage christianity. And the parent was banned from school grounds for threatening a violent attack on the school.
This article is misleading of the actual facts.
“If this parent gave a rat’s rear about his child’s education they’d have her in a private school, a parochial school, or home school.”
Why not fight for your child and the children of others?
Why abandon the field of battle and let the fools take over using taxpayer (your) money?
Then require Muslim students to write and recite the Nicene Creed. See what the Muslim parents do.
Require the Jewish students to write and recite the Shadada, see what Jewish parents do.
Require Christian students to write and recite the Mormon Articles of Faith.
And so on to kids who are of other faiths ... or whose parents are raising their kids atheists.
There is no way in hell students should be required to do this in PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
“The act of writing forms very strong neurological connections and associations.”
No kidding. When I taught composition, I would have students copy in cursive various authors to aid in understanding the style and competencies of that author.
Recently, the Cleveland Browns had their players keep an old fashioned note book in long hand rather than solely rely on their electronic notebooks and in turn saw the players remembering the plays and having a better understanding of the concept of what their coaches were trying to do.
I am home schooling an 11 year old who used to have trouble with word problems. Even something relatively easy, such as find the perimeter of a board, she struggled with. She would ask to do quadratics or cube binomials instead of doing a word problem. I had her write out how to do a simple math problem in long hand in sentence form and eventually progressed to having her write in sentence form how to do more complex problems. Her word problem abilities improved. This is because the portions of our brain that deal with numbers and that which deals with letters are separate and we need to work to make those connections.
just because someone makes claims and files a lawsuit doesn’t make those claims true. I’m just saying.
Oh I forgot.
Let’s require Muslim students to write and recite the Shema Yisrael. See what Muslim parents do.
One other post, 5 or 6 days ago, and before that, NOTHING until 2010??
And you come out of hiding for THIS?
Not buying it, despite the early signup date.
Cass Sunstein *FAIL*.
I agree. But the lawsuit is valid on 1A grounds. This should not be happening in PUBLIC SCHOOLS. This is why there is teacher or administration directed religious instruction allowed in public schools.
I have a cousin who is a public school teacher. We once got in an argument because she said that teachers should be allowed to proselytize to Catholic students to turn them away from what she considered a false religion (she was Protestant). She was making a claim too. When I pointed out to her that if that were the case then Catholic (or Muslim or Jewish) teachers should be allowed to proselytize their faith to students of her preferred faith she got red hot mad, almost violently so. “That’s different!” she said.
So you should be able to see why this suit is important. There are teachers out there with certain impulses.
ha! yeah, I have a long history here. Jim Robinson may remember.
I’ve been lurking lately because of the Trump phenonmenon. Was curious about FR’s reaction.
I only commented here because I have a personal connection to this story.
post 16 on the following thread is a list of info on Islam being taught in schools across the country via common core. Also at post 37 there are two other lawsuits in the works.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3390133/posts?page=16#16
STUDENT PUNISHED FOR REFUSING TO RECITE ISLAMIC PROFESSION OF FAITH (MD Lawsuit)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3390133/posts
No need build a prison there. Just airdrop them from a helicopter somewhere over ANWR with food and water and a blanket and tell them they are free if they can walk to Fairbanks.
You're one of the school admins, then. (eye-roll)
It didn’t take long for our Muslim president to encourage all this. You never heard of Islamic indoctrination in 2007 or before. Never. This all came about after the Muslim in Chief took office. This is all intentional and is on marching orders from Obama’s administrators. I’m sure there is no paper trail, just a “the president would appreciate it if Islam was taught in detail in the schools” kind of thing.
Ah, the old FReeper blame the victim attack.
Sorry, but these parents are paying for that school with their tax dollars, and their child has every right to get a decent education and not be indoctrinated in Islam in the course of it.
I wouldn’t send a child to public school now, although I did when my kids were young because the Catholic schools were, if anything, even worse and more ideologically leftwing and also didn’t even provide a good secular education. Homeschooling hadn’t even been “invented” yet, and while it’s available now, not everybody can do it, either because of time constraints or simply because they aren’t good at doing that kind of thing.
But the question remains: why should the state be able to take advantage of the public schools to indoctrinate the kids in Islam? This man was brave for filing suit and I hope they prevail, because this isn’t the only place in the US where this very same thing is happening.
Any Saudi prison would be more fun for them, however, if they object to that idea perhaps Turkey would take them - they have a great little prison in Sinope complete with Iron Maidens ...
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