Religious tossers afraid of fairness for schoolkids

Britain’s Right-wing, religion-loving Daily Telegraph is miffed that the government seem to be insisting on fairness in “faith” schools’ selection methods.

Oh, dear! it moans. A school has been penalised for awarding points based on when a child was baptised (i.e. given a religious tag it cannot possibly understand or appreciate before it can even talk, let alone make up its own mind whether it wants to pursue a belief in hogwash – note the “before their first birthday” reference in the extract below).

Cardinal Vaughan – a popular west London Roman Catholic secondary with six applications for every place – was ordered to rewrite admissions after being accused of skewing entry in favour of rich families by imposing over-complicated admissions.

It currently awards points to each child. This includes attendance at weekly Sunday mass over the last three years, proof they were baptised before their first birthday, evidence they made their first confession and Holy Communion before they were nine and that previous schools were also Catholic – a move the local diocese claimed “results in a form of social selection”.

But the barmy Telegraph sees nothing wrong with this form of discrimination, as instanced by its leading article on the subject, which is headlined Labour’s secular tyranny torments faith schools.

“The degree of government interference in the affairs of teachers and parents of children at faith schools is disgraceful,” it declares.

So bugger the needs of the child, then. Let’s just ensure that schools are allowed to discriminate on how superstitious a kid’s parents are and how superstitious they’re going to try to make their offspring become. That smacks of child abuse.

The paper says that “while Tony Blair was prime minister they [religious schools] were largely left alone (hardly surprisingly, since Mr Blair educated his own children at one of them)”. No, not just because of that, you silly leader writer: it’s largely because Blair is mentally unbalanced, too, when it comes to belief in sky fairies – and big time. The man needs psychiatric help for it, as do the unstable cardinals and bishops and all the other loons who peddle this tosh.

The paper talks of “the increasingly aggressive secularism of the modern Labour Party, whose members equate religion with superstition” (they’re not the only ones!), conveniently ignoring the very real fact of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money being spent on “faith” schools, which can impose their “ethos” on kids whether the kids want it or not; the fact that 26 bishops sit as of right in the House of Lords, something the “modern Labour Party” hasn’t yet done anything to change; the fact that the “modern Labour Party” is complicit in ensuring that all national celebration and mourning has a religious element to it; the fact that the “modern Labour Party”, as government, is taking on a coven of 13 “faith advisers” to “advise” on such matters as climate change and social justice (oh, dear, stop it, my ribs are aching); the fact that Prime Minister Brown has insisted that Britain is not a secular society and that religion must be at the centre of policymaking.

No need to go on. You get the picture. What we’re seeing here is that Christianity is dying and those who support it – including pious newspaper editors – feel their backs are against the wall, so they fight back with accusations of “aggressive secularism” and “militant atheism”.