I missed a post by the Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, who took strong issue with my recent post arguing that Sikh students shouldn’t be allowed to carry kirpans (their daggers, the wearing of which is a “religious requirement”) into public schools that have a zero-tolerance policy for weapons. In his rebuttal, “Lay off on the Sikh student allowed to bring a knife into his school,” Hemant defended the Sikhs as a beleaguered minority, whose religious “rights” I am apparently infringing.
Hemant makes a number of arguments: Sikhs don’t sanction using the dagger in a violent way; there are other things in schools, like scissors, that can be used as weapons; that kirpans have never been used as a weapon in American schools, and so on. But I really don’t get what he’s riled up about, for he also says this:
I do agree with Coyne on one point: I don’t see why the Kirpan has to be, for example, a stainless steel symbol and not a more harmless wooden one with a blunt tip. The faith calls for a Kirpan without going into specific makes and models. The school could easily create a compromise around that.
Well, that’s precisely what I suggested, and, if implemented, I would have no problem with it. Let the kirpan be a symbolic one, which satisfies both religious dictates and the school’s “no weapons” policy. So I’m not at all sure what Hemant’s beefing about, since we’re in basic agreement. Why all the palaver about “they’ve never stabbed anyone before”?
At any rate, to his credit, Hemant allowed a response from one of his co-bloggers, Terry Firma: “Kirpan controversy: Why Jerry Coyne is right and Hemant is wrong — Sikh daggers have no place in public schools.” Terry notes that Sikhs’ minority status is irrelevant to whether they get a right that no other students have; that the kirpan (unlike other religious symbols, like a cross worn around the neck) is a weapon; that Sikhism (contrary to Hemant’s claim) says that the kirpan can be used as a defensive weapon, and, indeed, has been used as both an offensive and defensive weapon in both the U.S. and India (Terry gives videos showing this).
Finally, in response to Hemant’s claim that kirpans are safe because they’ve never before been used as weapons in school, Terry quotes another writer:
I yield the floor to another atheist writer, James Kirk Wall:
“Should a drunk driver not be arrested if he’s been driving drunk for years without incident?”
I stand my ground here: Sikh schoolchildren (these ones are between the ages of 6 and 12) should not be allowed to carry daggers to schools, especially schools where other students must abide by a zero-tolerance policy for weapons. That is not only unwarranted religious privilege, but one that puts that privilege before the safety of other students. I’m happy for Sikh children to carry small symbolic kirpans, made of wood or cloth, and that would seem to be a good compromise. Why does Hemant insist on the right of an adolescent to carry a dagger into schools?
And I ask both Hemant and those commenters who agreed with him this: “If a religion required its advocates to carry loaded guns into schools, would that also be okay? If not, why not?”
