Richard Dawkins on a video for the BBC’s Daily Pol­i­tics dis­cusses the reli­gious and polit­i­cal labelling of chil­dren.

I feel very strongly that it’s wrong to label chil­dren with the opin­ions of their parents.

Nobody minds labelling a child an Eng­lish child, or a French child, or a Dutch child. But you’d think I was mad if I started talk­ing about a post-modernist child, or a Key­ne­sian child, or a mon­e­tarist child, or a lib­eral child, or a con­ser­v­a­tive child.

And yet the whole of our soci­ety quite hap­pily buys into the idea that you can talk about a Catholic child, or a Protes­tant child, or a Mus­lim child, or a Hindu child. That’s surely got to be wrong; to assume that a child will auto­mat­i­cally inherit the opin­ions of its par­ents about the uni­verse, the cos­mos and moral­ity. This must be some­thing that should be rectified.

via @andrewpmsmith