United Kingdom:The Melting Pot Simmers

The news in the UK recently seems to have become preoccupied with religion. Not long ago Jack Straw, the former foreign Minister who did a splendid job selling the invasion of Iraq to the public, remarked in a local paper that Muslim women should remove their veils when they visited with him in his surgery (politicians in the UK hold "surgeries" when they visit their constituencies). He said that the veils made him feel uncomfortable. He also said that communication between people is very difficult when you can't read the other persons face.

His remarks set off yet another flurry of protests and a barrage of religious debates. Just when the furor was dying down a Muslim teacher was suspended for refusing to take off her veil while she was teaching. She said she felt uncomfortable in front of her male colleagues and students without her veil, and that the veil was no hindrance to her teaching. But the local education authority disagreed. Then another government official, Phil Woolas, whose brief includes race relations, chucked his two pennies worth into the mix. In an interview with the Sunday Mirror he said:

"She cannot teach a classroom of children wearing a veil. You cannot have a teacher who wears a veil simply because there are men in the room.
"She is denying the right of children to a full education by
insisting that she wears the veil."

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis has warned that Muslims may be creating a self-imposed Apartheid. In an interview with Sky News he said:

"We have to give some real thought to making sure society does not develop along parallel lines,"

Meanwhile British Airways has become embroiled in a public outcry for insisting that employees should only wear religious symbols beneath their uniforms. Nadia Eweida, who works for the BA check-in team, was forced to take unpaid leave for refusing to take off her crucifix necklace while on duty. She refused to take it off or cover it up and so she was sent home. Then yet another former Minister, with yet another two cents worth, waded into the battle. Anne Widdicombe, former Home Office Minister, called for all Christians to boycott British Airways.

I am not going to voice an opinion on whether people should or should not be allowed to wear religious symbols at work, and neither will I say anything about how people dress. That is their business.

I don't care.

If a woman wants to hide away behind a veil because she is uncomfortable with men looking at her face, or if another person wants to wear a piece of metal around their neck depicting the painful murder of a human being , that is their business.

I don't care.

If politicians, who spend their lives jumping on and off bandwagons, wish to stir the public into religious frenzy in order to revive failed careers or ignite new ones, that is their business.

I don't care.

These are just the petty squabbles and minor skirmishes that often take place when cultures collide. As any society, made up of many different ethnic and religious groups, evolves, the apparrant differences between these groups will be amplified and eventually resolved. Time is the great healer...I hope.

But these differences can be blown out of all proportion when taken in the context of the greater conflicts that are raging in the world. Religion has divided and troubled the world for the last two thousand years, and it looks to carry on doing so for the foreseeable future..perhaps, if the faithful have their way, till the end of the world.

There is little room available in a cultural melting pot for absolutes...and religion is just such an absolute.