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England: Birmingham council appear to have failed to have paid any attention to the requirements of the law on religious discrimination when they decided to censor the internet for their employees.
The authority's Bluecoat Software computer system allows staff to look at websites relating to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions but blocks sites to do withwitchcraft or Satanismandoccult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism.
Under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, it is unlawful to discriminate against workers because of their religion or belief, which includes atheism.
One also wonders what Birmingham's social workers are expected to do if they have, for example, a Wiccan client, and they need to learn more about that faith in order to deal with them fairly? Perhaps they are expected to dig out those fundie dossiers from the late 80s' Satanic panic
?
Council ban on atheist websites—BBC News, 29th July 2008.
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at 18:46. Last modified on July 29 2008 at 19:14.
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Comments
1: Posted by: G. Tingey | July 30, 2008 11:17 AM
This is all over the Web, already.
The sites for the National Secular Society, "Butterflies & Wheels", and PZ's "Pharyngula" have good comments.
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
This is not a contacts site. If you are looking for help regarding a particular path, I suggest The Witches' Voice, which does operate a contacts service.
Allowed HTML:
a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, things will work better if you use the XHTML entities for those letters. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.