Now and then I come across stuff in the news that makes me say, “Hey, this is outrageous. I’m upset and disgusted by this. I am so mad, in fact, that I’m not even going to write about it, because I’m sure all those political webloggers like LGF or whoever will have a field day with it, and the PhDs in political science who make comments on the site will have much more to say about it than I do.”

Actually, I don’t say that out loud. That’s what I say after I’ve been thinking about it for a while, when I’ve calmed down and I’m a little more rational. Usually I say, “Jesus Chri– have you seen this? No, not that, this! This! This fucking… this! I can’t even believe sometimes how some– GOD!” Then I sputter some more and wave around the newspaper, or e-mail the URL to everyone I know, hoping that someone will share my outrage or explain to me why my blood pressure shouldn’t be tripling.

I avoid discussing politics for this reason — not because I lack the capacity to debate over it, or even the will to do so, but rather because my moderation is so limited. It’s too easy to become excited, then animated, then angered, and finally personal. The distance between rational discussion and viscious personal criticism is far too short for me, and the worst part is that I don’t see anything wrong with that. If you’re prepared to stand in my face and tell me how we live in a police state, and how much better your life would be under the governance of the benevolent Fidel Castro, then I have a right — if not a moral obligation — to call you a fucking moron.

In short, how do I spell ad hominem? F. U. N.

Consequently, when stories pop up that spur my outrage, I just save it for ranting at my steering wheel while I’m driving home. I can usually rely on the internet to articulate my feelings much better than I could, and without such a reliance on words like “fuck”, “god damned” or “I hate everyone so very much.”

That’s why I’m so surprised I haven’t heard anything about this: Chirac: Ban headscarves in schools. As in, President of France Jacques Chirac saying to his legislature:

I feel that wearing any kind of symbol that ostensibly shows faith, I feel that that is something that should not be allowed in schools and colleges.
If we are talking about a star of David, the hand of Fatima or a small cross, those are acceptable, but when it’s very obvious, in other words, when if they are worn people can immediately see what religious faith they belong to, that should not be accepted.

And then going on to add that he would sponsor a legal ban on Muslim head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in public schools. Hospitals, too:

Nothing can justify that a patient refuses, on principle, to be cared for by a doctor of the opposite sex. The law must consecrate this rule for all the ill who go to a public hospital.

Now, this was about three weeks ago, and I have no idea if anything has been done since. And it is perhaps true that, because I live in Canada and have grown up my whole life in a multicultural environment, I am over-conditioned to seeing people wear headscarves and skullcaps and other things that their beliefs absolutely require them to wear. Maybe things are different in France, and there you’re only allowed to wear nothing while you stroll the beaches of Cannes or else frumpy frocks while you craft chocolate that makes people want to fuck each other really hard. It’s impossible for me to say.


Above: A young French Muslim girl dons her headscarf, in preparation for a busy day of frightening Other French People Who Are Uncomfortable Around Muslims.

But what I can say is that Chirac appears to be taking the position that, if he can look at you from across your classroom and figure out from your clothes what your religious faith is, then you need to be removed from the school immediately. French administrators agree, apparently, because they’ve been expelling Muslim girls all over the country for wearing their headscarves in class. When people started to raise a fuss, they went ahead and funded a commission on it, who obligingly came back and recommended that if you didn’t want religious diversity problems in school, you should probably just make all of those things go away.

There is something to agree with here, which is that if you’re attending a public school and your personal savior is not, in fact, Jesus Christ, then you shouldn’t have to be subjected to a representation of him bleeding and crying all over the wall above where your math test is posted up. If it is part of a nation’s values to support religious freedom, then the state shouldn’t be imposing worship of any kind in a public space — whether that’s the Lord’s prayer, or a ritual sacrifice on the football pitch every October, or whatever. If you’re government is a secular institutions, then its agencies should be as well.

Fine, makes sense.

But then explain to me how that, in any way, applies to students in a school? Are the religious freedoms of Jean-Pierre the Catholic in some way polluted by the presence of Amal, the strict Muslim? Is her head scarf radiating some kind of religious intolerance that says, “Jean-Pierre, I deny you your right to Easter and Christmas and the Seven Sacraments”, merely by its presence? Will Eliad’s skullcap somehow destroy his teacher’s ability to maintain control of his class, with such blatant religiousity in full view of the other students? I’ve got to be missing something.

Let’s turn to the wit and wisdom of Jacques Chirac, to see if he can shed some light on this:

Chirac said the wearing of religious symbols threatened the cohesion of the French people and France’s separation of church and state.

“Secularity is one of the republic’s great achievements,” said Chirac. “It plays a crucial role in social harmony and national cohesion. We must not allow it to be weakened.”

Even though I’m Canadian, I’m not actually that good at French. I took it all the way through High School, though, so I’m going to see if I can translate from Jacques Chirac to English.

When Jacques Chirac Says… …he really means…
“I feel that wearing any kind of symbol that ostensibly shows faith, I feel that that is something that should not be allowed in schools and colleges.” “When you look at it these days, it becomes really obvious that all the biggest nutjobs are really religious. So let’s get those people out of our schools, poste haste.”
“If we are talking about a star of David, the hand of Fatima or a small cross, those are acceptable, but when it’s very obvious, in other words, when if they are worn people can immediately see what religious faith they belong to, that should not be accepted.” “If people are reasonable enough to conceal their faith so that it doesn’t bother others, then we don’t have to worry about them; if they’re too stubborn to take their head-thing-jobs off, then it’s even money that they’re probably going to bomb you.”
“Nothing can justify that a patient refuses, on principle, to be cared for by a doctor of the opposite sex. The law must consecrate this rule for all the ill who go to a public hospital.” “The tenets of your religions end where my sense of right and wrong begins, you fucking Muslims. Now fall in line!”
“Secularity is one of the republic’s great achievements. It plays a crucial role in social harmony and national cohesion. We must not allow it to be weakened.” “…so if you want to wear your head-things, get the hell back to where you came from. And when you arm yourselves to take revenge against the Western powers who reject you, remember to buy French!”


Chirac: …and I don’t know about you guys, but that lady over there in the weird dress is making me really uneasy. This is a public office, and I’m just not sure that’s appropriate.
Clinton: Oh, I’m not so sure. She looks pretty good to me, if you know what I’m saying. Pretty good indeed.
Chirac: Don’t you find displays like that distasteful? The ornate gown? The elaborate headdress?
Blair: For Christ’s sake, Jacques, that’s the Queen of England. I swear, we should have let the Germans keep you.

See? I started out all satirical and I ended up with the ad hominem there. The lure of personal attacks on transparent dickheads is just too tempting for me to ignore, I’m afraid. And worse, it fails to account for the logic that’s being applied here. Am I to understand that what Chirac refers to as the secularity of the republic is so prized that religion is to be erased from public spaces, at least as far as the government is concerned? That individual religious freedoms are, therefore, only respected as far as the point where they’re expressed to others?

And in the particular case of schools, what precisely is the lesson that’s being taught? That the personal traditions and requirements of other cultures are wrong, and therefore should be removed? I’m not even trying to invoke moral relativism here, defending beheadings or ritual stonings, but individual garments which have no impact on other people except to highlight that they:

  1. belong to a different cultural tradition, and
  2. might represent an alternative value system.

Is French culture so totally fragile that it can’t sustain either of these things?

There’s a paradox here, I think, in that the French government is about to preserve religious freedom by radically suppressing it. The only argument I can think that would support this is that, by removing personal religious symbols, it would be more difficult to single out those in the minority. But what kind of a sad statement is that, to assume that Jews or Muslims would be safer and more comfortable French citizens if nobody knows who they are?

And finally, why aren’t more people angry about this? We have entire legions of people defending the current role of the United States in the Middle East, bringing democratic freedoms to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan — or at least making a concerted effort to do so, anyway — so why aren’t they as disgusted and outraged by this as I am? All it would take is about twenty-five people with pen knives and Red Rider BB Guns to roll into Paris, and we could probably get Chirac to just roll right over on this whole issue–

–oh, and there I go with the ad hominems again. Perhaps I will just leave the politics to the more level-headed, after all.