This Seattle Times story, “Preserving modesty, in the pool” (thanks to T-ham), emphasizes that the Muslims-only days in Seattle’s Meadowbrook Pool are paid for as private rentals:
It’s Saturday evening, the end of a hot day, and a group of women and children have gathered at North Seattle’s Meadowbrook Pool for their monthly swim.
Most of the pool staff has left, except for two female lifeguards, who on this day will be on duty for the next two hours.
The women and children “” all Muslims “” have been swimming in private once a month at Meadowbrook as part of a program organized by the North Seattle Family Center.
Because Islam requires Muslim women to fully cover themselves in public, swimming in pools or the ocean is largely off-limits for many.
But across the Puget Sound area, that’s starting to change as public and private pools at times are sending home their male staff members, covering up their windows and allowing women of faith to swim alone and in private.
It’s occurring here as it has elsewhere across the country, as the Muslim population increases and families seek more ways to stay active.
Access to these pools is not free; the groups, like all others that use these facilities, pay a rental fee.
However, the Sound Politics blog (thanks again to T-ham) has discovered that the Muslims are not the ones paying the rent:
I made some calls and learned that the program, called “Muslim Sister Swim”, is treated by the city’s Meadowbrook Pool as any other private rental, which would be exempt from the city non-discrimination policy. However, the outfit that organizes and pays for the Muslim Sister Swim is the North Seattle Family Center, a unit of the Children’s Home Society, a non-profit that gets most of its money from various government sources. As such, it should strictly comply with non-discrimination guidelines. Nevertheless, the Muslim Sister Swim is open exclusively to Muslims, no infidel women need apply. I asked a representative of the North Seattle Family Center to explain this, and she told me that it was to respect these immigrant women’s culture.
But if there’s ever a reason for taxpayer dollars to be used to support an immigrant’s culture, it should be to support them in learning to shed whatever aspects of their culture are incompatible with American culture. The last thing we need to teach immigrants is to expect publicly-subsidized religious apartheid.
Would the Children’s Home Society fund a Whites-Only Pool Night? A Christians-Only Pool Night? Where is the ACLU?