School System Strikes Religious Holidays

Wow! Muslims asked the Montgomery County School Board in Maryland to add the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha as a holiday.

Instead of adding the holiday, because it did not meet certain guidelines for adding holidays, the board decided to scrub the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. Students will still get time off, but now Christmas will be called winter break and Easter will be called spring break.

The decision angered both Muslims and Christians. As this story in the Washington Post notes, Twitter, Facebook, and email lit up with protests. “Several Montgomery County school board members reported that few people of any faith seemed happy with their Tuesday vote.”

You can see a measure of the anger in the number of comments in the Washington Post story. Right now, the story has over 340 comments.  One person even commented that Montgomery County was trying to stamp out religion!

This might be an interesting debate for a religion class. Was the school board right? Was the Board trying to be “politically correct?”