In August of 2012, during the presidential campaign pitting Barack Obama against the Republican contender for the White House, Mitt Romney, the incumbent invoked the notion of “equal opportunity,” in an “America where no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, and no matter what your last name is, you can make it here if you try.” Even those who need a helping hand as a minority, say African Americans who had historically been victimized by the system, the president stressed, have Affirmative Action to fall back on.
Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice presidential candidate, agreed passionately — with a catch. “We promise equal opportunity,” he declaimed, “not equal outcomes.” And trust a Republican to inject a caveat like that into a notion that has been a mainstay of the law since the early 1960s.
It’s a given that equal opportunity is a major building block of America’s social ethos. After all, America is supposed to be a pluralistic society, a “nation of nations” whose population is made up of peoples who hail literally from every country in the world, subject to laws that do not discriminate against citizens (and legal residents) based on race, ethnicity or national origin.
Or is it? Sadly, from time to time, an incident here and a legislation there, jolts us into the realization that America is not all that halcyon a land after all.
Consider what happened two weeks ago in Montgomery County, outside the Beltway in suburban Washington, when the County Board of Education confronted — and no other word will do here — representatives of the Muslim community in the county who asked that the major Muslim holiday, Eid Al-Adha, be included in next year’s school calendar, along with Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. What? Giving equal billing to Muslim holidays? Forget about it!
Rather than accommodate the sensibility of the growing population of Muslim parents in the county, the county’s Board of Education voted 7-to-1 against it. But in order to avoid accusations of anti-Muslim prejudice, the board resorted to subterfuge: Religious holidays are not legally permitted. Schools close on Christian and Jewish holidays only by happenstance. Christmas? It’s winter. Easter? Well, that’s spring break. Yom Kippur? Oh, that coincides with autumn, when the leaves turn crimson and the leaves fall off trees. And so on.
Members of the board went one absurd step further — they voted to scrub references in the 2015-2016 published school calendar to all religious holidays. The schools will still close on those well-known Jewish and Christian holidays, but the closure will just happen to “coincide” with major holidays observed by Jews and Christians.
Last year, Muslim community leaders in the county urged Muslim families — along with their non-Muslim supporters — to keep their kids home for Eid Al-Adha, with the expectation that the absenteeism would be a nudge to the board. Roughly 5.6 percent of the 154,000 students who attend the county’s schools, and 5 percent of its teachers, responded. Clearly it didn’t work.
To be sure, Muslim students who miss classes on a Muslim holiday are given “excused absences,” but their parents argue, logically enough, that their children should not have to choose between their faith and their education, for missing even one day of school could leave students behind. But there you have it — the Montgomery Board of Education decided to eliminate the names of religious holidays (including Christmas, a hallowed name for Christians) from the school calendar rather than evince equity in holiday cheer for Christians, Muslims and Jews.
“By stripping the names Christmas, Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, they have alienated other communities now, and we are no closer to equality,” complained Saqib Ali, a Muslim parent and a former Maryland state delegate. “It’s a pretty drastic step, and they did it without any public notification.”
Petula Dvorak, a highly respected and popular columnist in the Washington Post’s Metro section, wrote: “If the school system was going to make that move, it should have done so decades ago, when other school systems switched to generic ‘winter’ and ‘spring’ breaks, not in response to Muslim parents ... Those parents have been asking for years — without success — to have at least one of their major holidays recognized. Then they realized that Montgomery schools would be closed on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2015, because it’s Yom Kippur. That happened to be the same day as the Eid Al-Adha. So the Muslim parents asked the school to simply add the name of their holiday to the school calendar. Instead of saying ‘Hmm, interesting,’ the board wigged out and voted to eliminate all names of religious holidays from the calendar.”
So why did the board vote 7-to-1 to take such a drastic step? Search me. One hates to think that it was propelled by an Islamophobic sentiment. Perhaps President Obama was wrong after all about how, no matter where you come from and no matter what your last name is, you can make here if you try.
And the day my kids will have off on Sept. 23 next year, well, maybe the Montgomery Board of Education will call it, Hmm, let’s see, Intolerance Spring Day Parade. And we’ll all — Muslims, Christians and Jews — leave it at that.
