Vote: What's your view on school prayer in Rhode Island school? (Jessica Ahlquist)

[LeftishBrit]

66. She did not 'make' most of the school hate her

They chose to hate someone for being different from themselves. Where does it end?

Note: because I live in a country where school prayer is both (nominally) compulsory and totally ineffective - only 12% of the British population go to church regularly - I started out by thinking that all these complaints about school prayer and other symbolic religious gestures in public were rather a fuss about nothing. But it is reactions just like Jessica's schoolmates and neighbours that make me more supportive of such complaints. I doubt that most of the hostile reactions are because it's really desperately important to the people in question to pray in school. If it were, they could pray in private; or organize a prayer group out of school. It is about mob spirit against an uppitty atheist daring not to conform, and pointing out that this demand for conformity is unconstitutional in America. So as I say, where does it end. Supposing it's an uppitty Jew or Muslim, refusing to eat pork or ham? Supposing it's an uppitty gay, confronting homophobia? Supposing it's an uppitty leftie, defending the poor and homeless against the Republican anti-welfare attitudes? Supposing it's an uppitty 'geek', insisting on studying, in the face of an anti-intellectual peer group? Really, this is just a form of bullying like any other form of bullying - using religion as an excuse to attack the person who's 'different', just as one might use clothes as an excuse to attack the person who dresses unconventionally. I don't feel very strongly about school prayer one way or another (see first sentence of this paragraph); but I do feel strongly about people bullying and hating non-conformists, and I do very strongly disagree with the concept that the victim, by outspoken nonconformity, 'makes' others bully and hate them. The bullies and haters are responsible for their own actions: no one 'makes' them act that way, except themselves.