Some common sense can be made to prevail, it seems, in our overenthusiasm to appease Muslims at the expense of British cultural norms.
A London council has backtracked on its original rule that, while Muslim sessions are going on in a swimming pool, non-Muslims should dress in goodness knows what in order to cover up as much flesh as possible.
The nonsense of this is that a local mosque, while praising the original guidelines, says it wouldn’t have actually asked for them.
So this is council employees and councillors bending over backwards to appease religious sensibilities, to the ire of the host culture, when it’s not even been asked for.
Is that not political correctness gone truly mad?
The story doesn’t make it clear why non-Muslims are allowed into Muslim sessions, unless it’s just that these sessions are those to which Muslims are merely particuarly encouraged to come.
Mosque trustee Shuaib Yusaf said, “If it was designated as a Muslim session to encourage Muslim women to come along, to that extent I could see a degree of merit in it.”
Even so, a public pool is a public pool. If Muslims are prepared to pay for staff to hold special sessions when the pool would normally be closed, and that extra use did not impinge on maintenance or other practical considerations, then there is probably no harm in having Muslim-only sessions or nudist-only sessions or special sessions for devotees of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
gay and lesbian matters, rationalism, atheism, freethought, secularism — this is the weblog of the Pink Triangle Trust, the only gay humanist charity
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Wednesday, 19 August 2009
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