Magaly Valentin (left), and Rosalba Gomez (right) Arlington Food Services prepare fresh salads and vegetable cups for the National School Lunch Program in the kitchen at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, Wednesday, October 19, 2011.
USDA Photo by Bob Nichols.
Religions in the USA are continuing their campaign to be allowed to continue to victimise and bully minorities and women, using religion as their excuse.
The latest move is to persuade the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to drop its insistence that to participate in the free school lunch program, schools must not discriminate on the basis of sexuality or gender identity.
The National Schools Lunch Program is a federal initiative that provides meals for tens of millions of children in public and non-profit private schools. Schools had complained that participation in the program would oblige them to comply with the non-discrimination provisions of "Title IX" - a 1972 measure aimed at ensuring equal opportunities at educational establishment across the USA.
Last July, Grant Park Christian Academy of Tampa Florida, launched a lawsuit, supported by the unashamedly Christian nationalist hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom, claiming exemption from the non-discrimination provisions of Title IX on the grounds that the school taught a “biblical worldview about marriage, sexuality, and the human person.” In other words, it intended to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and teach the students to do the same, based on ancient texts written in the Bronze Age.
And recently, the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, withdrew from the lunch program, claiming that:
In other words, the catholic schools would no longer be allowed to discriminate against the LGBTQ community, continue to condemn same-sex marriages and victimise and demonise homosexuals, and teach their students to do likewise. Obviously the Catholic Church would rather have children go hungry than to grant everyone full human rights.Accepting any federal subsidy would subject archdiocesan schools to federal mandates that could impede a school’s ability to faithfully carry out the teachings of the Catholic Church
USDA memo 'clarifying' Title IX non-discrimination requirements.
This particular issue is just part of the wider issue of religious institutions in the USA, as elsewhere, continuing to resist laws requiring them to accord the same human rights to others that they claim for themselves, as society evolves it social ethics and comes to regard previous discriminatory and divisive cultural norms as antisocial. Taking their ethics from ancient texts written in the early days of human cultural development, when brutal, autocratic, male-dominated, coercive and discriminatory laws were the norm, religions are faced with the dilemma of either abandoning the excuses they once relied on and adopting modern, civilised ethics, or continuing to lose members who increasingly see them as advocates for repugnant, antisocial policies.
Recent examples of this growing tension are the sacking of teachers from Catholic schools who reveal their LGBTQ identity, including a St. Louis diocese school, which sacked a popular music teacher for announcing his intention to marry his male partner, pushing back, some schools arer resisting pressure from the church to sack openly gay teachers, and some sacked teachers are suing for wrongful dismissal on the grounds of discrimination.
Meanwhile, Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches are becoming more and more shrill in their demands to be allowed to continue to resist social progress by continuing to bully, victimise and demonise minorities and genders of their choice, using religion as their excuse.
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