© the eyeranian

For once I can fully agree with Pedram! The state should not dictate how people can express their religious beliefs as long as they are not infringing on other people's rights. Headscarves, crucifixes and skull caps certainly do not infringe other people's rights. I think schools should only have the right to ask to remove any headwear that blocks the face of the pupil when identification of the pupil is necessary for exam or other similar classwork.

dittos on all, this reminded me to comment on this as well. Thanks. sheesh :(

Finally! Something we can ALL agree on! :)

I am not sticking up for the French, but here is some analysis, typos and all.

The French nearly lost thier identity several times over the last hundred or so years. Meaning, there almost wasn't a France anymore. That leads them to be defensive about 'being French'.

It is interesting to note that there is no French analogy for 'Monty Python'. They simply can't be self mocking. They take themselves and 'being French' so seriously. Its also part of the root of thier anti-Americanism.

It certainly sounds as if thier banning of yamurkles and crucifixes was just a cover for the head scarf ban.

Personally I can understand banning the burqa, that all encompasing 'bee keepers suit' that the Taliban made thier women wear. And people should not be allowed to get any sort of official identification with thier face covered.

But if they ever try to ban headscarves in the USA I will be writing my congressman in opposition.

Hey I like this picture, thank you

Yes! Finally something we can all agree on!
I think this is a shame for a democratic country. You see that all over Europe though. In this regard (freedom on personal level not political) the US is a paradise. Did you know that people in Denmark are not allowed to name their children after Jesus.
With all the dislike I have for any kind of religion I can not accept this. This is putting limitations on freedom and that is the very basic right for every individual living in a democratic society that should be protected by the law.
I think what France did is as ugly as Iranian government's Islamic dress codes, and American's preyers in school.

Pedram, is it really hard to see "the French"'s point? Public schools are funded by public money, and public has decided not to use any part of that money for religious propaganda. So, what is your problem here? Put your money where your mouth is and start funding French schools which allows religious showmanship. Also, do not forget that the kids in schools most likely have not decided their religion by their own choice, and that religion is more or less forced by their parents.

Coward, are you being sarcastic or serious? It doesn't cost a cent to anybody else for a pupil to show up wearing a skull cap or a headscarf.

The public money is also paid by muslims, jews and whatnot. The word democracy does not mean mob rule or even the rule of majority, it means that everybody is entitled a say in society and that minority rights are protected. To me forbidding practice of religion sounds like a textbook case on infringing the basic rights of the minority. What you seem to promoting is not that the state should stay out of issues of religion, but that the state should promote atheism, which in fact is just another religion (a religion with a history as filled with prophets, fundamentalists and jihads just as any other).

Of course France isn't doing this to promote atheism, but to quell the racists who voted Le Pen second to Chirac. While I can sort of understand the politics of this, I think it is really wrong.

BTW not only religion is "forced" by parents but also language (which IMO is much more important part of me), manners, ideology, traditions, etc. I at least try to teach all those things to my daughter.

You guys are all right, but as a Parisien watching these maghrebi school girls doing their daily life under those horrible scarfs, I must say that I fully agree to the la Loi Pour laicité. The 80% of them does not even know why she is covering herself up (she may not be even aware of what Islam truely is) and she is doing blindly what is dictated to her from her parents and the tradition. So with her scarf on she is not free neither to express her true thoughts. This is when one needs the system to intervene in order to avoid the society to categorize itself and build up communities unaccesible for non moslims, which is the case in todays immigrants world in Europe.

Well, at least you have to envy a country where headscarves in schools is the biggest national controversy...

I think this decision is typical of the worst aspects of French thinking. It is really not enforceable. What are they going to do if someone doesn't want to take their religious symbol off? Throw them out of school? I'm sure a few staunch Muslims will refuse to obey, get kicked out of school, and the ensuing outrage will force a repeal of this silly law.

This law turns schoolteachers into enforcers of national policies on religion, which will create conflict and acrimony in the classroom. I'm sure no teacher looks forward to policing their students' religious symbols.

I'm sure the Europeans are all regretting their colonial spasms which opened the doors to mass immigration from their former colonies. Hey, the French seemed to like the Arabs so much, they made a point of taking them over. Same for most of the Europeans. What goes around, comes around.

What I am hoping for is that some smart-ass French Christian students, boys and girls, start wearing the headscarf just for the hell of it. Then they'll have to conduct an investigation on a case-by-case basis to determine who's wearing the scarf for the hell of it and who's doing for "religious reasons". It might take a few years before they realize the absurdity of the situation.

I am all for secularism, and the principles of the Enlightenment. But reason and common sense are part of the Enlightenment. The government, especially the national government, really shouldn't care what kinds of clothes the people wear.

I think this is the basic problem of the mullahs in Iran. I agree with them that sluttiness and dressing like prostitutes is bad. Wouldn't everybody prefer women (and men) to be virtuous and modest? Passing a law can't bring virtue to anybody.

Orkideh, my daughter has no idea why I dress her the way I do. The fact that the way she is dressed in reality expresses her Lutheran/European roots is completely lost on her. I'd be very angry, if somebody forced me to say put her a headscarf because they don't like the way she is dressed.

The stupid thing is that any such forceful interference with peoples tradition is going to have a backlash in more fundamentalism and anger. Why not let the parents do their job in raising their kids and then the kids are all grown up they can decide for themselves what to wear - no doubt they will do that before the parents are ready for it.

So the French have finally decided to join the fight against extremists, radicals, and dangerous subversives. Thier first target,,, SCHOOL GIRLS!

I don't know how I feel about headscarves. I went to Algiers in 1981, when the women were being forced to wear their scarves again, after years and years of freedom to wear them or not, and those women I spoke to felt threatened, felt very nervous about the future, looking at this as the thin edge of the wedge as regards women's freedoms.

I think (but I may be a political moose in this respect) that the fact of children not being allowed to wear scarves, yarmulkes, crucifixes, etc. INSIDE the classrooms is not such a threatening idea. There would be total freedom to wear them outside the classroom, as I understand it. What's the difference with saying, for instance, you can't attend class wearing gym shorts, or a swimsuit, or a ballgown? Just a neutral dresscode, allowing the kids to focus on studying, rather than checking each other out to see what their religious affiliations might be.

I have to admit my childhood was spent in a Catholic convent, so there was no diversification at all. We knew we had Protestants among us, and we also knew we had one Chinese student who was not a Christian, and we had a very strict rule that the subject of religion was forbidden between us and these "outsiders". In other words, whether we liked it or not, we were not allowed to talk religion with these other girls, and this was in order to make us respect their very differences.

The French are a real melting pot. Just look at all the "stars" who are from somewhere else, the Italians (Yves Montand, the Belmondos, for instance), the Poles, the Turks, the Armenians (Charles Aznavour), the Greeks (Nana Mouskouri), well, I don't want to try the name dropping, it gets boring, but try it for yourselves and you will see how the immigrants in France really are adopted. That is the difference between France and other European countries, Paris always trickled down. The Normans, who invaded from the north, within one generation had intermarried and learnt to speak French, before they invade England, where they brought a little bit of French to salt the English language, but where within a generation they were all speaking English of sorts. Side by side with this particularity, there has always been a hatred of the outsider, so that a peasant girl from a village only ten miles down the road, having married a farmer and given him two, three, four children, is still considered "a stranger" years later by the rest of her husband's village. "Oh, she 'comes from somewhere else'", they will say about her, and that will be all the comment they need to make to express all they feel about the way... she hangs the wash up in her yard, or dresses her kids, or milks her cows, or wears her hair, or bakes her bread.

France is full of irreconcilable differences of opinion, yes, maybe that is what happens when you actually have "freedom of opinion". So, you have the ones who hate the Arabs and the ones who love the Arabs, the ones who hate the Jews and the ones who love the Jews, the communists and the fascists, and you even have the ones who still are missing the German occupation, but you have the same mixture of good and bad tendencies as anywhere else in the world, but bottom line, I think the Chirac government is doing its very best to protect the freedoms of all these people, is doing its best to keep the BALANCE, to enable all the different factions to cohabit in HARMONY, without feeling threatened and having to take up arms to make their point.

Avoiding provocation can sometimes take courage and energy too. I mean a lot of different things, when I say this. I will choose to give just one small example, you'll get the picture. I am not an angry person, by nature, but I do have somewhere in me an anger nature: if you come and punch me in the nose, and insult me with loud noises and push me around, that little anger nature in me will rise right up and fight back, because if you attack me hard enough I might not have enough wisdom not to escalate the situation into one of confrontation.

From my limited, unenlightened point of view, I think Chirac is right to promote this law, no headscarves in school, or yarmulkes, or crucifixes, because it emphasizes the separation of state and church, and let's face it, the schools in France are mostly state schools.

Can someone tell me why everyone is making such an issue of forbidding the headscarves and not so much of forbidding the yarmulkes and crucifixes? Noone seems to be bothered about forbidding those but when it comes to what women should be wearing and how they should appear in the public,all of the sudden everyone cares.
To me women are the number one victims of Islam and this we can see by the fact of how they are forced to dress and act in a certain way that Islam wants whereas men can just stay men and do what their nature tells them to do. Covering the hair is only for women and this distinguishes the moslim women from the non moslim women symbolizing the moslim religion. But if one would go back to the history and study the reason why Islam made the headscarf compulsory (in a time where women were not even considered as human beings), we find out that covering the hair has nothing to do with an ideology and women did it at that time simply to protect themselves from the barbarism and this is proven by the antropoligical point of view in that part of the world where men seem to have a certain macho mentality and a higher lust than elsewhere. So women are kept being forced to cover up until the day of today through the tradition and without even knowing why they are covering up in the first place. So a law coming to forbid the headscarf is not a limitation to freedom but is an imposed freedom by the state targeting moslim women to free themselves from their dress code dictated by their tradition.
Doesn't it seem a bit strange to you that women have to carry the signes of Islam all the time?

Maybe its because many Jews in Europe have not been wearing their yarmulkes for years now with younger boys replacing it with baseball caps after getting an okay from higher religious figures and as for LARGE crucifixes banned by this law, who wears them large enough and OUTSIDE their clothing for it to be noticed any ways?

This "law" directly affects Muslim girls primarily and that is why everyone is talking about it.

It really doen't matter what we think if Frenchis collectively decide how to deal with religion in thier schools or for that matter in their bedrooms. The diffrence between France and Iran is....well do I have to waste key strokes here!!!!!!

Don't throw things, this is just a thought for discussion; Is forcing women to dress in a certain way similar to idolotry? The way I read the Koran on the dress code for women is that they should dress conservatively and try to not look slutty. Suppose someone told you that you'd go to hell for wearing sunglasses. Its so petty, that in my mind I can compare it to bowing to a statue.