Straining credulity: Woman gets OK to wear colander on head for license photo

Because it has nothing to do with schools. And for that matter since when has any religion had any say over any science curriculum in any public school system in Massachusetts. But again, this has nothing to do with education.

I can accept that these people are adopting their own articles of faith, and if they are doing this theoretically to make a point about public education, they look even worse.

I sometimes mock my own religion. Heck, a lot of Catholicism is built for that, but yeah, I have a big problem with people expending a lot of effort, including taxpayer dollars, to mock other people's religious beliefs. A while back,at this website, I was taken to task for telling a story about how I thought Unitarianism was strange (the seeming lack of a unifying belief system) then changed my mind when a Unitarian pointed where I was wrong (they do have a unifying belief system after all, but within that a bunch of different beliefs was allowed, which is kind of cool.) The point missed was that I was wrong for even doing that in my mind. I chill with Jehovah's Witnesses, ponder how Muslims view things different than I do, and of course enjoy seeing how Talmudic scholars debate issues. At the end of the day, people believe what they believe. If someone develops a serious belief that a flying spaghetti monster created the universe, all power to them, even though I think something else caused things to be. But if they are doing it to mock people, shame on them.

with this particular point of the CFSM's extended parody of religion. It's all of a piece: "We insist on acceptance of all the religious-freedom rights ascribed to any religion. That extends to wearing headgear that non-adherents might find odd. If you truly believe that such rights are deserved by other denominations, why would you deny it to us?" It still boils down to the same point: "If you want to teach your religious myths as science in public schools to our children, we demand equal time, and the fact any such teaching in science classes is ridiculous is exactly our point."

Trying to conflate that very self-consistent bit of satire with simple mocking of more-established denominations' religious practices, as opposed to their self-stated objective of keeping religious myths out of our science classrooms, can only sensibly explained in two ways: either you object to any satire of anyone's religion, or you are going out of your way to miss the point they are so obviously trying to make.

It strikes me as particularly perverse that some people want to cast it as an attack on specific religious sects with overt adherence to religious headgear. Many religions hold to this practice in some form or another: it's logically inconsistent to try to twist it into an attack only on Sikhs, Jews, and Muslims. To me, that smells like a cynical red herring: the real issue is that Fundamentalist Christians are trying to subvert the teaching of genuine science in public education -- their efforts in Kansas to that effect were precisely what gave birth to the CFSM -- and one way to distract attention from that obvious point is to introduce imagined offenses to other religions.

If you want to argue that this particular bit of satire is in poor taste because in your mind it singles out the most obvious adherents to religious headgear, you are welcome to that opinion. But I think you are playing into the hands of people who think their best defense of their promotion of a state-sponsored religion is to accuse defenders of church-state separation like the CFSM of being insensitive to religions that Fundamentalist Christians privately would love to see marginalized. That's not just a disingenuous line of attack, to my mind: it's un-American.