Not Colorado, but I couldn’t resist writing about the controversy erupting in France over yet another story of French officials barring muslim women from wearing certain clothing.
From The New York Times:
Officials on Wednesday insisted that they objected to the woman’s use of the burquini, popular with some conservative Muslims, because of France’s unusually strict hygiene standards in pools – not because of official hostility to wearing overtly Muslim garb. Under the policy, swimmers are prevented from wearing any street-compatible or baggy clothing.
…French lawmakers recently proposed a ban on the burqa and other voluminous Muslim attire, and President Nicolas Sarkozy backs the move.
I am proud to say that, no matter how rabid an anti-Muslim movement became in this country, there is no way in hell that the government could get away with something like this. For being such a “liberal” country, this certainly wreaks of authoritarianism.
Perhaps if the claims that this was for “hygenic” purposes had come before President Sarkozy publicly backed a plan to ban all burqas and other “repressive” clothing, then it would be slightly more believable. Head scarves, skull caps, and other religious garb have already been banned from French schools. Unfortunately for France, this is exactly how it looks: an attempt to force Muslims to abandon part of their culture if they want to be fully integrated into society.
If you ask me, the repressive aspects of Muslim culture aren’t the fact that women are expected to cover most of their bodies when they go out in public–it’s that the law in many Muslim countries dictates the practice. Laws like that, along with laws forbidding women to hold office or own property, have no place in a modern society. However, if women choose to cover themselves, that that is a different story entirely.
Being the country with the highest Muslim population in Western Europe, you’d think the French would try to meet folks halfway on things like this. They got away with the head scarf ban, but kicking Muslim women out of public pools is going too far.
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Before the French Revolution, Catholicism was the established religion in France and was closely associated with the state and the monarchy.
The French Revolution took steps to radically disestablish the Catholic Church, setting up a new established “secular” church with seized church property, elected bishops, and a new non-Catholic calendar, to name just a few things, instead.
While some of the British colonies that ultimately joined the U.S. had established churches, there was not a national consensus, and there wasn’t the strong sense of alignment between church and state. Several of the original U.S. states had religious refuguees and dissenters as important formative populations — the Puritans, the Quakers, and Methodists among them. So disestablishing any particular church wasn’t as big an issue for the Founders. That was the status quo at the fedreal level.
The legacies remain. The French state actively seeks to secularize public life, while the Americans merely seek governmental neturality towards religion.