Vaccination Optional for New York City Kids

Some children are excused from what we all assumed is a basic obligation to society: being vaccinated against serious illnesses that spread so easily in places such as schools. Yet students entering New York City public schools are not required to submit to free and available protection against deadly communicable diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis. All their parents need do is plead a religious exemption. Through a little-advertised loophole, which acts like a license, spiritual claims are accepted at face value. When it comes to religious diversity, we do not dare open ourselves to charges of intolerance. If sound science offends, that scientific truth is worked over to make it right. Even medicine must be politically correct. That means that since all cultures are equal ( isn't diversity without judgment what America is now about? ), and some cultures ( none of which can be called primitive ) reject Western medicine as the devil's work or the invention of infidels, the rest of us must submit to their prophets even if it means exposure to their disease. We go easy on the credentials of holy men, whatever their so-called teaching. Isn't that the legacy America has come down to?