Euthanasia a bad law by bad people, says bishop

Sydney Morning Herald, Leesha McKenny, February 1, 2011

EUTHANASIA was contrary to the ideals of justice and charity and would corrupt society, a Catholic bishop has warned the legal fraternity.

The Bishop of Parramatta, Anthony Fisher, used a service at St Mary's Cathedral yesterday attended by the NSW Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, the shadow attorney-general, Greg Smith, and leading judges and barristers, to warn that ''state-sanctioned killing'' undermined the legitimacy of the state and its criminal law.

''Even were such a proposal to gain a parliamentary majority this would not make it right,'' he said.

  Illustration: Cathy Wilcox

''Bad laws are mostly made by bad people and in turn make people bad.''

Bishop Fisher called on those gathered for the 81st annual Red Mass, which marks the start of the legal year, to resist efforts to legalise voluntary euthanasia.

The Greens leader, Bob Brown, has vowed to reintroduce a bill to overturn federal legislation that prevents its legalisation in the ACT and Northern Territory.

In NSW the Greens intend to introduce a private member's bill in support of legalising euthanasia after the election in March.

A NSW Greens MP, Cate Faehrmann, said the bishop's comments were an example of an ''out-of-touch commentator driven by out-of-touch ideology''. ''The vast majority of people support voluntary euthanasia as long as it's with appropriate safeguards, which is what the legislation I am proposing is about.''

Bishop Fisher, a former lawyer, said the proposed legislation was ''the killing of those who suffer by those who are comfortable, of the vulnerable by the powerful, of the sick by those professed to heal them''.

''Pope John Paul II went so far as to deem such laws 'lacking authentic juridical validity' and requiring lawyers and health professionals to refuse conscientiously to follow them,'' he said.

That remark echoed comments of Cardinal George Pell in a newspaper interview last month, where he denounced Catholic politicians who defied the church's teachings when considering controversial issues such as euthanasia or same-sex adoption.

The Premier, Kristina Keneally, a devout Catholic, told News Ltd at the time that the cardinal's comments risked being ''interpreted as condemnatory and threatening''.

But she said yesterday she did not personally support the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia.
''As I have said previously, a politician's faith and how they reconcile their beliefs in their public decision-making is a matter for each individual MP.

"The NSW government is yet to see the Greens' proposed legislation and will give it due consideration when it is forthcoming."

When asked if the bishop's comments on euthanasia were appropriate, Richard Perrignon, president of the St Thomas More Society (which sponsors the Red Mass), said the bishop was well-known for his views on euthanasia.

''It's a democracy we live in and people are entitled to their views - even prelates,'' he said.
A spokesman for Mr Hatzistergos, who is Greek Orthodox, referred to comments made in 2002 when he spoke against the Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill. The bill introduced by a Greens MP, Ian Cohen, was defeated.

Source url: http://www.smh.com.au/national/euthanasia-a-bad-law-by-bad-people-says-bishop-20110131-1ab4u.html

Belief Culture: "We Don't Need No Education"

"Watching, listening and even commenting on the cultural debates over climate change, evolution and education, I come back to the evolution debate and the cavalier discounting of evolutionary theory by the vocal members of the belief culture: evolution is just a theory, they state emphatically. "Just a theory" reveals two very important aspects of the failure of the belief culture.

First, the statement reveals that most people misunderstand the term "theory." "Theory" is a scientific term (and, thus, a nuanced term) that is analogous to what laypeople would call fact, since a theory is the conclusion drawn from applying the scientific process to credible and extensive evidence. And that leads to the second important aspect we can draw from the statement.

By conflating "theory" with "hypothesis," the spokespeople for the belief culture are suggesting that "theory" is no better than "belief" - that we shouldn't accept things without evidence.

And this is the central problem with a belief culture - espousing erroneous and contradictory ideas while discounting reasonable and evidence-based information simply because that knowledge contradicts tradition.

Leaving a society trapped in the most dangerous aspect of belief: entrenched ideology."

To read more, go to: http://www.truth-out.org/belief-culture-we-dont-need-no-education67154

February discussion topic: Humanist Philosophy and Worldview

Dear friends,

You are invited to join us for a fun discussion followed by dinner. See details below.

Date and time: February  12, 2011 at 5:30-7:30pm. 

Donation: A $3-$4 donation to cover cost of room would be appreciated.

Place: 2251 High Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301

Moderator: Armineh Noravian

Readings: All readings can be downloaded from the following sites. 

Must read: (I have kept this short)

a)      Herrick – p.12-20 (https://sites.google.com/site/sanfranciscobayareahumanists/home/herrick)

b)      Questions for discussion – (https://sites.google.com/site/sanfranciscobayareahumanists/home/questions) 

For those interested in reading more:

a)      Dan Harper - A systematic account of humanism (http://www.danielharper.org/blog/?p=7826)

b)      Humanist Manifesto III (http://www.americanhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_III)

c)      Amsterdam Declaration (http://www.iheu.org/adamdecl.htm)

d)     Affirmations of Humanism (http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?page=affirmations&section=main)

e)      Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values: Personal, Progressive, and planetary (http://dangerousintersection.org/2010/03/24/neo-humanist-statement-of-secular-principles/)

f)       I have other materials, which I will be happy to share with anyone interested.

Format: You can (1) read any or all of the article(s) that is provided for each meeting, (2) read something somewhat related to it, or (3) be prepared to share a situation that has some connection to it. We'll have a moderated discussion of all the above.

Rules: Listen and contribute to a diversity of views respectfully, especially ones you don't agree with.


Dinner: After our discussion we'll walk to Peking Duck Restaurant for dinner. (151 South California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA - (650) 321-9388.) (Note: this is different from where we normally meet)
If anyone has another somewhat related reading they wish to share please let me know.

I look forward to seeing you and anyone you wish to bring along.

Armineh

Ataturk Was a Secular Nationalist Who Implemented Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing of Millions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Other Christian Minorities in Turkey.

In an article called “Saving Aqsa Parvez” in The Humanist magazine (the official magazine of the American Humanist Association) of October 2010, the author Luis Granados said that Kemal Ataturk had brought the humanist revolution to Turkey, implying that Ataturk was a humanist. Granados is wrong about Ataturk, as Ataturk was no humanist.

Rouben Paul Adalian[i] , the Director of the Armenian National Institute in Washington, D.C., and the author of From Humanism to Rationalism: Armenian Scholarship in the Nineteenth Century, the editor of Armenia and Karabagh Factbook, and associate editor of Encyclopedia of Genocide, writes[ii]:

“Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) was the founder of the Republic of Turkey and the consummator of the Armenian Genocide. Kemal was an officer in the Turkish army whose defense of Gallipoli in 1915-1916 defeated the Allied campaign to breach the Dardanelles and quickly eliminate the Ottoman Empire from World War I. … he stayed out of politics until 1919 when he organized the Turkish Nationalist Movement …. 

…. The attack by Kemalist units against the city of Marash in January 1920, which was accompanied by large-scale slaughtering of the Armenians, spelled the beginning of the end for the remnant Armenian population. …. 

The final chapter of the Armenians in Anatolia was written in Smyrna (Izmir) [by Kemalist forces] … in September 1922. … Mustafa Kemal completed what Talaat and Enver had started in 1915, the eradication of the Armenian population of Anatolia and the termination of Armenian political aspirations in the Caucasus.

In 1936 Kemal began to pressure France to yield the Sanjak of Alexandretta, or Iskenderun, a district on the Mediterranean under French administrative rule whose inhabitants included 23,000 Armenians. Preoccupied with the deteriorating situation in Europe, France yielded when Turkey send in its troops in 1938. Kemal died that year having prepared the annexation of the district. His action precipitated the final exodus of Armenians from Turkey in 1939 as most opted for the French offer of evacuation to Syria and Lebanon rather than risk mistreatment yet again.”

[Important aside: In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared.[iii] Ataturk’s involvement in the Armenian genocide took place prior to him being designated President of the newly proclaimed Republic of Turkey in 1923, as described above.]

George J. Dariotis, the Supreme President of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association writes[iv]:

“While Ataturk did shape Turkey into a secular Turkish state, as Turkey's first dictator he did so by committing widespread human rights violations against his own people and by implementing the large-scale massacre and ethnic cleansing of millions of Turkey's Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christian minorities.

After his forces had already routed the Greek army out of Asia Minor in 1922, Ataturk's troops perpetrated one of the most infamous and widely reported war crimes against an urban civilian population prior to WWII. According to reports by U.S. Consul George Horton, Ataturk's troops massacred 200,000 Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna (now Izmir), burning this cosmopolitan New Testament city to the ground while Western warships passively watched from its quay.”

P. D. Spyropoulos, Executive Director of the American Hellenic Media Project writes[v]:

"Arguments advocating the collective guilt of Asia Minor's indigenous Greek population and the fact that the mass slaughters of populations and other horrors perpetrated under Ataturk's command were effected during a time of war, should make any decent-minded person recoil in horror: both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were perpetrated under cover of war, and these very same arguments have been used by apologists of these and other horrors to alternatively justify or excuse them."

He also writes, “Given Ataturk's pivotal role in the massacre of tens of thousands of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christians in Smyrna during Kemal's 1922 invasion and destruction of that once-cosmopolitan city; given the fact that Kemal was a high-ranking officer in the Young Turk government when it perpetrated the Armenian and Pontian Greek genocides and that his dictatorship established the Turkish state's official doctrine of denying and covering up these genocides; given that his regime's ethnic cleansing of over a million Greeks extinguished Asia Minor's indigenous Hellenic civilization from an area that it had flourished in for two millennia (see http://www.ahmp.org/1922NYT.html for reports of the 1922 holocaust by The New York Times); given Ataturk's brutal repression of practicing Muslims; and given the fact that Kemal Ataturk is directly responsible for creating the authoritarian militocracy that continues to rank as among the worst human rights violators on earth and as Europe's worst postwar transnational aggressor -- in effect the only nationalist-fascist government to have survived the WWII era to this day -- ….”

In summary, Ataturk was a secular nationalist who implemented massacres and ethnic cleansing of millions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other Christian minorities in Turkey. 

Ataturk’s belief that Islam was holding Turkey back from being able to have the power that the Western nations had is why Ataturk chose to follow a dictatorial secular path.  It was a desire for power, not humanistic concerns, that motivated Ataturk.  Secularism (separation of religion and government) is what all humanists and many religious groups support; but secularism in itself is not humanism.

Ataturk is also responsible for the various laws in today’s Turkey, one of which forbids people in Turkey from criticizing Ataturk.  According to human rights organizations, Turkey has some of the worst records for torture, unjust arrests and disappearances, and "unsolved" murders mostly committed by state-sponsored nationalist groups that call themselves "Kemalist", after Kemal Ataturk.

Ataturk’s legacy is secularism, combined with ruthless nationalism, realized with conscious use of fatal force against innocent human beings. For Granados, the author of the article in The Humanist, describing Ataturk as a humanist and omitting mention of the atrocities he committed is much like calling Hitler a great leader and omitting mention of the holocaust. For humanism to flourish, all of us, particularly the American Humanist Association in its magazine, must be careful not to make such harmful associations.

Armineh Noravian

------------------------

[Armineh Noravian was a member of the Board of Directors of the Humanist Community in Silicon Valley between 2007-2010, where she served as Vice President in 2008 and President in 2009 and 2010. She was also President of the Silicon Valley Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and state from 2005-2006, and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU, Santa Clara Valley chapter from 2006-2008. She holds a M.S. in Engineering and a M.A. in Applied Anthropology (cultural).]

---

[i] http://www.abrilbooks.com/artists/2492.html (retrieved 1/5/2011)

[ii] http://www.armenian-genocide.org/kemal.html (retrieved 1/17/2011)

[iii] http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocide.html (retrieved 1/7/2011)

[iv] http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.greek/msg/48ffd33b4bd555b0? (retrieved 12/8/2010)

[v] http://www.ahmp.org/AtatStat.html (retrieved 12/7/2010)

Watch: Colbert Takes Down Limbaugh for Racist Chinese Rant

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Rush Limbaugh Speaks Chinese
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Hey, Glenn Beck, Stop Inciting Death Threats Against Professor Piven

The Center for Constitutional Rights just sent a letter to Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, urging him stop Glen Beck from inciting violence against professor Piven through his constant intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods about Piven.

You can download the letter from : https://sites.google.com/site/sanfranciscobayareahumanists/misc

Hate Jar

What does Leadership Mean?

The wounding of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others, and killing six bystanders in Tucson, Arizona, sparked much discussion about gun laws and vitriolic political discourse in this country. Perhaps this horrendous event is also an opportunity to look at what leadership means in a democracy and define our own roles as citizens.

On radio and television, newspapers and blogs, there are politicians, pundits, and others who express views with the intention of influencing opinions. Regardless of whether we agree with their positions, these people play public roles as leaders; they influence not only opinions, but also actions. However, being influential or having a public platform to express views comes with responsibilities.

Being a leader means acting in a manner that’s appropriate to the situation. For instance, sometimes leadership is about sitting back and listening. Sometimes it’s about being a consensus builder. At other times it might mean defending your views passionately. A smart leader is one who can read the situation and act accordingly.

But more importantly, a leader has to do what is in the best interest of all, with the goal of creating a more democratic, inclusive, open, civil, and dignitarian society.

Leaders in political office are elected to make a difference. They have the power to bring about change that they think would benefit their constituencies. They can do so by rationally setting forth their ideas and convincing people by reasoned arguments. This is in contrast to Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona, who for political and/or ideological reasons, demonized a group of people – undocumented immigrants – and advocated a law that allowed ‘special’ treatment towards them. She did this by making incendiary remarks, such as claiming, without foundation, that headless bodies had been found in the desert and signed the bill that gave the police wide authority and responsibility to demand proof of citizenship from people suspected of being undocumented immigrants (although portions of this bill are currently being challenged in court). Even if I agreed with the idea that undocumented immigration, a complex issue, can easily be fixed by getting rid of the undocumented immigrants, I would have opposed Brewer because of her dehumanizing of immigrants in ways that I find despicable; creating fear and hatred towards others is not the kind of leadership that we need, just ask anyone who has been through a genocide or has lived as a minority. It creates the kind of atmosphere in Arizona that has caused it to be labeled the “New South”; this is not the kind of leadership that creates a better society.

The event of Tuscon has made leaders from both political parties, including Brewer, and some pundits behave in a much more cordial manner, at least publicly, and at least for now. The big exception has been no other than Sarah Palin. Even Matthew Dowd, a former political advisor to President George W. Bush, was reported as saying that Palin’s message was not appropriate for the moment of national grief and that she had missed an opportunity to be seen as a leader. He was quoted as saying “Sarah Palin seems trapped in a world that is all about confrontation and bravado… When the country seeks comforting and consensus, she offers conflict and confrontation.” It seems that Palin is the kind of leader that is unable to judge the situation and act appropriately.

Perhaps the real lesson learned here is our role in a democracy: to clearly define expectations of our leadership and hold our leaders to it. Leaders have to be able to articulate a vision on complex issues that meet the needs of all in a manner that is not vitriolic, bullying, intimidating, or dehumanizing. Disagreeing passionately is good; disagreeing using threat and intimidation is not. If any public figures cross the line, if they dehumanize a group of people and select them for special treatment, they should be shunned. These are not acts of leadership, but acts of irresponsibility and destructiveness. We deserve better.

Armineh Noravian

When Congress Was Armed And Dangerous

By JOANNE B. FREEMAN

New Haven

THE announcement that Representatives Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Jason Chaffetz of Utah are planning to wear guns in their home districts has surprised many, but in fact the United States has had armed congressmen before. In the rough-and-tumble Congress of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, politicians regularly wore weapons on the House and Senate floors, and sometimes used them.

During one 1836 melee in the House, a witness observed representatives with “pistols in hand.” In a committee hearing that same year, one House member became so enraged at the testimony of a witness that he reached for his gun; when the terrified witness refused to return, he was brought before the House on a charge of contempt.

Perhaps most dramatic of all, during a debate in 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. (Someone eventually took it from his hand.) Foote had decided in advance that if he felt threatened, he would grab his gun and run for the aisle in the hope that stray shots wouldn’t hit bystanders.

Most famously, in 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor so brutally that Sumner had to be virtually carried from the chamber — and did not retake his seat for three years. Clearly, wielded with brute force, a cane could be a potent weapon.

By the 1850s, violence was common in Washington. Not long after Sumner’s caning, a magazine told the story of a Michigan judge who traveled by train to the nation’s capital: “As he entered the main hall of the depot, he saw a man engaged in caning another ferociously, all over the room. ‘When I saw this,’ says the judge, ‘I knew I was in Washington.’”

In Congress, violence was often deployed strategically. Representatives and senators who were willing to back up their words with their weapons had an advantage, particularly in the debate over slavery. Generally speaking, Northerners were least likely to be armed, and thus most likely to back down. Congressional bullies pressed their advantage, using threats and violence to steer debate, silence opposition and influence votes.

In 1842, Representative Thomas Arnold of Tennessee, a member of the Whig Party, learned the hard way that these bullies meant business. After he reprimanded a pro-slavery member of his own party, two Southern Democrats stalked toward him, at least one of whom was armed with a bowie knife — a 6- to 12-inch blade often worn strapped to the back. Calling Arnold a “damned coward,” his angry colleagues threatened to cut his throat “from ear to ear.” But Arnold wasn’t a man to back down. Ten years earlier, he had subdued an armed assassin on the Capitol steps.

As alarming as these outbursts were, until the 1840s, reporters played them down, in part to avoid becoming embroiled in fights themselves. (A good many reporters received beatings from outraged congressmen; one nearly had his finger bitten off.) So Americans knew relatively little of congressional violence.

That changed with the arrival of the telegraph. Congressmen suddenly had to confront the threat — or temptation — of “instant” nationwide publicity. As Senator John Parker Hale of New Hampshire reminded his colleagues within minutes of the Foote-Benton clash, reports were “already traveling with lightning speed over the telegraph wires to the remotest borders of the Republic.” He added, “It is not impossible that even now it may have been rumored in the city of St. Louis that several senators are dead and weltering in their blood on the floor of the Senate.”

Violence was news, and news could spawn violence. Something had to be done, but what? To many, the answer was obvious: watch your words. As one onlooker wrote to the speaker of the House shortly after Sumner’s caning, “gentlemen” who took part in the debate over slavery should “scrupulously avoid the utterance of unnecessarily harsh language.” There was no other way to prevent the “almost murderous feeling” that could lead to “demonstrations upon the floor, which in the present state of excitement, would almost certainly lead to a general melee and perhaps a dozen deaths in the twinkling of an eye.”

Unfortunately, such admonitions had little effect. The violence in Congress continued to build until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Today, in the wake of an episode of violence against a member of Congress, we’re again lamenting the state of political rhetoric, now spread faster than ever via Twitter, Web sites, text messaging and e-mail. Once again, politicians are considering bearing arms — not to use against one another, but potentially against an angry public.

And once again we’re reminded that words matter. Communication is the heart and soul of American democratic governance, but there hasn’t been much fruitful discourse of late — among members of Congress, between the people and their representatives or in the public sphere. We need to get better at communicating not only quickly, but civilly.

Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history at Yale, is at work on a book about violence in Congress.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/opinion/12freeman.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Working together for secularism: A joint declaration by IHEU’s French member organizations

The National Federation of Free Thought (Fédération nationale de la Libre Pensée - FNLP), the National League for Popular Education (Ligue de l’Enseignement et pour l’Éducation populaire - LDE), the Rationalist Union (Union rationaliste - UR), the Movement Europe and Secularism (Mouvement Europe et Laïcité - CAEDEL), French Member Organizations of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (Union Internationale Humaniste et Laïque - IHEU) have published the following join declaration (en français):

Working together for secularism: A joint declaration by IHEU’s French member organizations

Our organizations have different backgrounds and different goals. Past and present struggles have shown the diversity of our approaches on present topics, and yet our organizations are willing to emphasize their deep agreement on essential questions that the secularist movement is facing.

The 1905 law is constitutional

Confronted with the findings of the Machelon Report, to insinuations and questions from the Government and to different mistakes made by local authorities, CAEDEL, LDE, UR and FNLP are willing to state clearly that they consider the Law of December 9th, 1905 on Separation of the Churches and the State as a constitutional safeguard of the freedom of conscience. Along with all the regulations on freedom of trade unions, political liberties and freedom of association and meeting, freedom of the press, this law makes up an indissoluble unit of Constitutional Law. It guarantees a strict republican equality in the field of opinions.

By enacting the principle of separation between religions and the State, i.e. by separating what is the realm of ideological and metaphysical concept from political, social and cultural reality, an essential liberty of the rights of individuals has been established. The absolute freedom of conscience is the affirmation of the rights of individuals against communitarian duties. Our organizations reject the idea that the multicultural nature of society should be made institutional by establishing rules allowing delays in natural evolutions in modern society.

There is no genuine democracy without the guarantee of the absolute freedom of conscience.

There should not be any challenging of this inalienable right, the foundation of human liberty. Everyone should be free to follow his/her path as he/she likes.

Secularism is emancipating

In the effort of liberating the individual, the establishment of public, secular and compulsory education has been an essential step forward to promote a knowledge freed from obscurantism. That is why the secularist movement has always supported all public funds being allocated to education for all (schools and universities). Our steady and resolute opposition to the Debré Law of December 31st, 1959 is the public landmark of this opinion.

But the forces of reaction, in the political, religious and social fields, have made every effort to get their revenge.

In an immense effort to build the Republic, public education has educated whole generations not to fight against opinions submitted to a free debate but to refuse dogmas imposed on human conscience. The establishment of the principle of state monopoly to deliver university degrees gives the tool to guarantee this provision everywhere. We would like to remind that the state monopoly to deliver university degrees (established in 1880) relatively protects our country against obscurantism circulated by neo-creationists concerning the theory of Evolution, against religious dogmas concerning social behaviours condemning the fight against AIDS, etc., in public education.

The recent move of the Government to demolish that principle for the benefit, to date, of Catholic and Protestant schools is a major concern for our Organizations. That is why, with different forms, those Organizations have publicly marked their opposition to the Kouchner-Pope Benedict Agreement. The ruling given by the Council of State does not invalidate the fundamental question of our legal actions; it limits the claims of the Vatican but the danger is still there.

Today, the growing recognition of the role played by the private sector of education can be seen in the increase of public funds allocated to it under different forms and the weakening of Public Education through cuts in its resources, more cuts in the allocated number of jobs and the implementation of standards of the private sector.

The Minister of Public Education plans to cut 16,000 teaching jobs for school year 2011, including 5,000 jobs in secondary schools, 8,000 jobs in primary schools, 2,000 “Full Time Equivalent” students in Education currently being trained in schools. More than 50,000 teaching positions have been abolished since 2007. From 1996 to 2010, the number of teachers’ positions opened in competitive examinations has been downsized by 45% to 89%, depending on the branch of learning.

From pre-school/ nursery school to university, including IUFM [training colleges] and CNRS [Research Institutes], secondary schools and Graduate Schools, there is a will to transfer the responsibility and the duty of the state and government institutions to the market-oriented private sector, whether religious or profit-making.

The “Education Voucher” would be directed at the same object. Parents are given an “Education Voucher” by the government, which is money for school fees; parents choose the school and the form of education they like for their children. Education is subsidized - no longer schools that become “free”: fees, pedagogy…and therefore schools are made competitive economically as well as in the field of education! This system is partially implemented in a series of countries: USA, Great Britain, etc. This is a preparation for privatization of education, dismantling a public service for the purpose of exploitation by religious and corporate business groups.

The increasing number of private schools being used as examination venues for national degrees (Secondary school exam, university degrees, etc…) is a real violation of the absolute freedom of conscience of teachers, their civil servant status as well as the families’ and students’ philosophical and/or religious beliefs

 LDE, UR, FNLP, CAEDEL want to express their formal opposition to this process, under any circumstances, and are willing to launch a series of initiatives to lead in common the necessary actions, confronted to the multiplication of onslaughts of different kinds which endanger the finality of the aim of public education in the service of the emancipation for all.

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Source: http://www.iheu.org/working-together-secularism-joint-declaration-iheu%E2%80%99s-french-member-organizations