I find your attacks on some thoughtful posts here unfair. You call “understood here” and “supposed” weasel words, and say that their author implied that this problem can only be understood by French people. I find this is an unfortunate misreading. I can say “cuisine as it is understood in France”, meaning that is is different from cuisine in Japan, without implying that Japanese chefs cannot understand French cooking, and indeed they sometimes understand French cuisine marvelously. I hope I am not putting words in their mouths, but the posters’ point is that France has a different conception of the place of religion in education. Much as France and the US have a different conception of free speech rights. Or consider British libel laws which have been briefly touched upon in another post on this blog. Now you may well think that one conception is better than the other, and I may well agree with you, but please state those differences and your arguments and do not accuse the posters of bigotry or guess too boldly at their intent.

Back to the subject of this post, maybe we can narrow things down a little.
i) A rather common position in France is that education should be neutral with regard to religions. Neutral here means that religion should not be visible, it does not mean letting all religions be equally apparent. The idea is to leave a space for children before their majority to be free of any religious influence. Whether this is a desirable goal is open to debate.

ii) Implementing this raises a number of problems. Banning religious symbols or imposing school uniforms are possible solutions. Once again, whether these are judicious means to attain the goal above can be argued. I would like to note in passing that I dislike the reference to “France’s Islamic headscarf law” in the original post. the law is against all religious symbols, and even if one may argue that it is targeted towards muslims, as I believe, using this qualifier makes readers think that France has passed a law specifically against one religion, and thus distorts the debate from the start.

iii) Even without arguing point i), one can still debate practical issues and solutions. In this case the pressure that women may feel to wear the headscarf. Or how to resolve the friction between religious prescriptions and the civil laws of a state.

And about your little paragraph on the symptoms of bigotry, please tell me where posters like François or Ms Benson have implied that “all members of the stigmatized religion are victims of mind-control by sinister religious leaders”.

François is my real first name, by clicking on it you will get my full identity. I cannot figure how someone so much older and experienced than I am did not figure this before posting an aggressive, superfluous, scornful and IQ-lacking attack.

I guess we are going to disagree and that’s it.

Yabonn’s “separation of church and state as it is understood here, the role schools are supposed to fulfill” hinges on the weasel-words “understood here” and “supposed.” So the pro-ban position circles back, time and again, to argument by assertion and to the implication that this is a purely French matter whose subtleties can be understood only by French people.

A final word, to anyone still reading who finds me too harsh in all this: an essential presupposition of bigotry is that all members of the stigmatized group are essentially alike, so that evidence against one convicts all. A typical presupposition of antireligious bigotry is that all members of the stigmatized religion are victims of mind-control by sinister religious leaders. Both assumptions are a way of dehumanizing people by portraying them as having no minds of their own and no capacity for thoughtful independent action. The consequences of this kind of stigmatization, across history, have been ugly. As an exercise for the student, therefore, go through the pro-ban posts and see how many times you find logic that rests on either or both of these two assumptions.

You and others don’t seem to see that banning is not protecting space and liberty for some who freely choose to wear the veil.

I think we (the pro law) see the inconveniences, and think the benefits outweight them.

If Muslims don’t like the social pressure that certain other Muslims put on them to wear the veil, resorting to the state to outlaw its use in schools hardly seems the right way to tackle what you perceive to be wider social pressure and peer pressure.

Muslim children. But anyway :

Is there another way to make sure that each veil is wore freely? That no one is harrassed in school about it?

Later, both the secularist and tradition argument look weak to you. Quite simply, they don’t here. But yes, if this boils down to “comment peut on etre français”, this is probably the best argument against the law.

But of course life in society is always a matter of competing freedoms and encroachments. There are all sorts of things we’re not allowed to do in all sorts of places and contexts, so I don’t see the fact that the ban is an encroachment on freedom as a knock-down argument by itself.

Maybe there’s a simpler explanation? One not involving social-democrats of doom (plan : hide your life-long religious hatred of muslims, seize power, annoy them), the state wide religious oppression of muslim women (plan : hide your oppression by polling for the law, making pro-law association), and sharp-eyed online diagnostics of bigotry?

Like : separation of church and state as it is understood here, the role schools are supposed to fulfill, the complaints of the muslim women associations, that kind of things?

If it didn’t pass trough before, it won’t make it this time, i’m afraid. I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree and all that.

A different argument that has been mooted is the secularism argument, which, in so far as its validity rests upon empirical evidence about what is necessary for shared values and cohesion, looks to me extremely weak. If this secularist argument is one of “principle” or “tradition”, then it seems to me even more groundless in the face of what most Western countries accept by way of pluralism and diversity.

No. It’s a start, it’s a crack.

And you know you’re dealing with a bigot when Francois’ only reply to being called on bigotry is to repeat the bigoted statement and to say that the alternative is “politically correct statements.” Given this bigotry, yes, I tend to think that the claims of laicism are insincere.

My point about a “culturally-Christian” majority, to be clear, is to make a distinction between religiously-professing Christians (some of whom were more thoughtful on this question), and the vast majority in France for whom various forms of Christianity are a matter of cultural background, whatever their practice. It’s this background that comes very much to the fore when Jews or Muslims are stigmatized and regarded as somehow less than fully French.

It is presumed that adult women are able to make their choices freely, ot go to the police.

Veil is a problem in school because it is considered children deserve a neutral zone, where they can learn enough to make their own, independant, educated choices as adults (insert marseillaise, watery eye, and the third republic here). The “being forced by your peer/family to wear a religious thingie that hides you, or be presumed a slut” doesn’t fit in that.

Another case is civil service, where signs are banned too, it’s more a matter of neutrality of the state to religions.

You have oversimplified what you read to turn it into a unilateral view that you could then easily beat by a “let people choose” argument. The word for that was used in a previous comment: one-eyed. I think it lacks intellectual honesty to proceed so.

The “council” in question was created on request of Muslim groups, there was hence a demand for an official representation.

It is part of our own national model that schooling and religious belief should never interfere, in a way or another. Coercion was used (although reluctantly) to enforce a model which you apparently do not know, understand, nor try to understand. Which brings me to return to flip your relativist comment back to you: why can’t people make up their own minds about what it means to live in a “laïc” country?

The assumption that they cannot think is also evident in his response that “We have a Muslim Council here, who clearly stated you could be an observant Muslim AND drop your veil at school.” So what? This is only an argument if you assume that young women take orders from “Councils.” Why can’t people make up their own minds about what it means to be religiously observant?

A spectacle you can see twice a year when vast numbers of Muslims ignore the so-called authorities and celebrate Eid on what they consider the real Eid day, rather than the day the Saudis claim is Eid. Muslims will treat the words of “authorities” with extreme suspicion when they appear to be politically compromised.