Church of England's role

Interesting that the Church of England keep popping up the current "debate" on multiculturalism, integration and the veil.

Aishah Azmi's was suspended from a CoE school for wearing the veil. More substantially, it was them that first flew the kite about the 25% attendance of non-CoE members at their schools. The government are now making this compulsory for all new faith schools.

In reality, this is directed at new Islamic schools. Faith schools of other denominations are not on the same rise, and if it was intended to be fair, why apply it only to new schools? Surely existing CoE schools could from now on make sure their first year intake had 25% set aside?

Dr Daud Abdullah picks up on the CoE angle in today's Guardian:

In such charged circumstances, people might hope to hear words of tolerance from others of faith. But alas, the Church of England has added to the confusion. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, demanded that Muslims do more to integrate; then a "leaked" document criticised the government's multi-faith policy for allegedly pandering to Muslims at the expense of Christians.

Maybe the CoE have joined the Catholic Church in thinking that the cosy interfaith happiness dead.

Comments

[ainelivia]

Must have missed this, Andrew Bartlett wrote, "I am sorry, but that is absolute bollocks. Presuming by this country you mean Britain, this is utter nonsense." in response to a portion of my comment, in which I said, "these murders, which for many years in this country have not been spoken of are actually only now being treated as a crime."

So why Andrew, have the police recently stated that they are retro-investigating some deaths over a period of years?

Andrew also wrote "Martin's selective approach to the murder of women presents the murder of women as something alien to 'our' culture and endemic to 'theirs'. That will not save a single woman but will advance the cause of racism."

A fine and noble goal to eradicate racism; however, you'll also need to eradicate patriarchy with it, that, would be more urgent in my opinion and would do far more for the women of this world.

Perhaps yours is the selective approach, along with that of an Australian cleric whose imagery of women as being something that attracts sexual abuse, and note he only spoke of women to my knowledge. Selectivity you say,.... be fair please, there's a lot of selectivity out there getting media attention and most of it the kind of invective spouted by ministers of religion, all religions.

[joe90]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6090984.stm>Ministers face faith school fight

The government agrees to Catholic-only schools - and I thought it was Muslims who didn't want to integrate.

I wish that Catholics would do more to integrate themselves - I am sure the Archbishop of York would agree.

Here are some stats from the above article -

ENGLAND'S FAITH SCHOOLS
Church of England 4,646
Roman Catholic 2,041
Jewish 37
Muslim 9 (expected)
Sikh 2

As you can see,
there is a very real threat from Islam undermining our traditional Christian British way of life -

- nearly 7,000 Christian schools versus Muslim schools you can count using your fingers - it's under-whelmimg!