School Skipping Mosque Visit Was Best Course, Attorney Counsels
by Jim Brown
March 5, 2004
(AgapePress) - A pro-family attorney says a public school teacher in Ohio made the right decision when she cancelled a class field trip to a local mosque.After a number of concerned parents objected to the planned field trip to the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, Edgewood Middle School teacher Debbie Weber dropped the idea. The trip for three seventh-grade social studies classes was intended to be part of their study of the world's five major religions.
Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, believes the decision to cancel the field trip was for the best. He says schools can adequately teach children about various religions without sending them on a mosque tour guided by Muslim leaders.
"There is no control over what these individuals might say," Thompson notes, "and by sending [students] to a particular mosque, it overemphasizes that particular religion and gives an imprimatur of approval for that religion. And I think people of other faiths such as Christians or Jews would take offense to that."
Thompson says if the school officials were to go ahead with the trip or plan a similar outing, the school should give parents an opportunity to opt out of the visit for their children.
According to the attorney, in a growing number of cases around the U.S., public schools are using alleged discrimination as a pretext for proselytizing for Islam. "Many Islamic organizations are using this idea that they are being discriminated against as a way to get schools to allow them more leeway to talk than Christians are allowed to talk about the Christian faith," he says.
The Thomas More Law Center is currently involved in a federal lawsuit against a California school district that requires seventh-grade students to take a three-week intensive course on "How to be a Muslim," and grades them on how well they observe the tenets of Islam.
