Here in Cincy the talk over the weekend involved a “victory over those evil Mooslem types” up in John Boehner country as students at a high school up in Mason were bullied out of an exercise in religious tolerance, mainly because the religion in question wasn’t Christianity.
A group of Muslim students organized a one day challenge to their fellow students to wear a hijab to school for a day in order to promote religious understanding of Muslim culture, and if you know anything about the northern suburbs of Cincinnati (which is John Boehner’s district up all the way up to Dayton), you know damn well “religious understanding of Muslim anything” sure as hell doesn’t exist there.
What started out as a cultural awareness effort by Mason High School Muslim students this week morphed into a fierce 48-hour debate about prejudice, freedom and religion in public schools.
By the end, Mason High School canceled the “Covered Girl Challenge,” and principal Mindy McCarty-Stewart sent an apology to district families. The challenge was student-sponsored and voluntary, meant to combat stereotypes students may face when wearing head coverings, McCarty-Stewart wrote.
“As word spread beyond our school community … we received many strong messages that made me reconsider the event’s ability to meet its objectives,” she wrote. “I now realize that as adults we should have given our students better guidance.”
Even afterward, though, the episode and arguments illustrate the fault lines in Greater Cincinnati – and the U.S. – over where cultural awareness ends and promoting a religion begins. And where avoiding controversy ends and turns into bigotry.
When the right-wing hatemongers got wind of this, the students found themselves as targets, with the blogs claiming that the school was “forcing all female students to wear hijabs” and attacking the student group for perpetuating human rights violations against Muslim women. By Thursday, the principal had canceled the April planned event completely while the half the wingers were screaming THE GREAT BETURBANED HORDE IS FORCING SHARIA LAW and the other half were concern trolling about how hijabs are demeaning to women in ‘Murica.
The reality is that this event happened without too much trouble at other schools and universities in the US, and again it wasn’t a problem even when it happened at high schools in the Midwest.
But somehow, Mason, Ohio became a firestorm. Maybe nobody noticed until it happened in the House Speaker’s home district, or maybe it was just because there was an opening in the Perpetual Right Wing Outrage calendar, and the Big Wheel came up “Islam taking over our schools” or something. Most likely it became low-hanging outrage fruit when a school e-mail account was used by accident to promote the event, but I have to think that if it was “Bible Challenge Day” organized by students, this wouldn’t have registered a blip.