Flash from Canada

So, dig it. I got this piece of news from The Daily Show’s “This Week in God.” Nobody else seemed to want to cover it. The Canadian Supreme Court (or whatever they call it up there) ruled recently that a 16 year old Sikh must be allowed to wear his ceremonial dagger to school. The knife is one of the five Ks, or articles of faith, that Sikhs must keep with them at all times (the others are uncut hair, long underwear, an iron bracelet and a comb). How do I know so much about Sikhism? JP knows. Anyway, it has always seemed to me that in a society that guarantees freedom of religion you have to allow people to keep the covenants of their faith. The dagger in high school issue surfaced in California when I lived there. There are a lot of Sikhs living in the central valley. It is a very tricky problem. In the interest of public safety California decided it had to force Sikhs to break faith with their religion. That always pissed me off.