I work at an urban high school in the US that currently kowtows to two religions: Christian religion (especially the African American Baptists and Eur Am Protestants, but not Catholics of course) and the Muslim religion. It is mind boggling to watch the way the Muslim religion is being catered to here, especially because we have a fairly sizable Jewish student community, and somewhat smaller Buddhist and Hindu communities, at our school that have never received an equivalent "equal" treatment in the schools. The only accomodation those groups get is an excused absence for their holy days.

It is very odd. I have been vocally supporting the ban on religious symbols in the French schools as this controversy has played itself out over the last several years. The problem here in the US public education system is we don't have school uniforms, so it is now impossible to enforce such dress codes as the "national public school standard". I really wish we did have uniforms. Then it would be much easier to police the boundary between church and state in the US, as it is in France.

As it stands now, what keeps happening is the Christians keep getting their foot in the door on more and more issues in public education. Last year in my school library, we had a meeting called by our African American Baptist district superintendent of area religious leaders, looking to become involved in educational initiatives in and partnerships with our public schools.

I was appalled, as were a number of other staff at the school. But our African American Baptist principal thought it was just great.

So, for those of you who think it is just the Eur Am Bushie/Falwell fundies who are taking over our American public education system, think again. There is just as strong and vocal a movement of conservative, reactionary Christians in the schools: the African American Baptists. They are insinuating themselves into the schools by manipulative use of the "cultural tradition" euphemism for playing the race card. They get away with it by doing things like bringing their church music to middle school auditorium stages all across America in little African American Baptist themed "escaped from slavery" pageants, that sort of thing.

Old school African American education leaders never used to do this sort of thing. But now, with the fundie Christians having risen to the political ascendancy in the New Democrat/New Republican USA, the fundamentalist leaning, conservative African American Baptist middle class is right there taking advantage of it. These are the people who proclaim Bill Clinton as "the first black President".