See below.

I’ve argued that it is a misogynstic way to enforce secularism (as it does not force secularism in the same way on male children).

True. But then, male children don’t wear equivalents to the hijab. One can hardly call a measure misogynistic for dealing with circumstances facing only women.

You seem to be focusing on the law as a women’s empowerment measure, not as a vehicle for secularism. (These are two separate issues. If it were clear that religious people are not sexist, some Frenchmen would still argue that the law is necessary. But, from your arguments, I take it you would not).

The hijab as it is currently defined isn’t required to be worn by Muslim women–modesty is the key element. Inasmuch as the hijab is being forced on young women attending French public schools, as an emblem of illegitimate pressure applied to them to adopt a version of Islam which they don’t want and which is sexist, the two subjects (women’s empowerment and secularism) intersect. That the current legislation fits into a fairly long and extensive French tradition of prohibiting religious proselytization makes the issue easier.

I would argue that the law is also a sub-optimal tool to empower women. The headscarf itself is not inherently anti-woman apparel (which should be obvious from your recent trip to Ottawa).

Actually, it wasn’t. Several reasons for this.

Firstly, with the exception of two teenage girls, the only women I saw wearing headscarves of the hijab were in their 30s, at least. This admittedly casual and non-scientific street survey doesn’t suggest a large teenage contingent of hijab wearers.

Secondly, prosperous downtown Ottawa /= French banlieues, while the origins, status, and prospects of Canadian and French Muslim communities are rather different. Generalizing from the Canadian situation to the French is a difficult task of dubious value.

Thirdly, it’s quite possible to recuperate offensive and/or unwanted cultural elements for one’s cultural group–cf the use of racial epithets on rap albums. That can only happen, though, if people have the cultural capital needed to exploit and subvert these elements. Adults have that autonomy, and I’m skeptical about teenage girls.

The context in which women are forced to wear it.

For some, it definitely limits their autonomy. For others that is not the case. The former may benefit from the French law, the latter suffer. I think it is possible to design a policy response to benefit the former group of women while doing no harm to the latter.

OK. What policy would you suggest? The only alternatives I can imagine involve unacceptable police-state levels of surveillance.

For me, there were three critical elements, on the specific situation of French public schools, which made me support the legislation as it applies to these public schools:
There is already a tradition of using public education as a way of socializing people in the norms of national society.
There is already a tradition of aggressive campaigning against religious proselytization, active or inactive, on the part of students.
There is a serious concern that many young French Muslim women, below the age of majority, are being pressured into wearing the hijab.

Consequently, this creates a need on the part of the French public school system–especially given the first two established principles–to try to relieve this pressure.

These factors do not operate in the private school system, and they do not operate in the public health system, or indeed in state bureaucracy. I believe I haven’t defended the application of the law to these other domains, though I do think that I should have made my opposition to the extension of this law to other domains clear. For this, I apologize.

That fact alone makes it a bad law. But even if the government wanted to go ahead with a bad law, they could have packaged it is such a way to recognize that the headscarf is not inherently anti-woman, and that the government will to whatever it takes to mitigate the attendent damage(ie. to beef up laws prohibiting job discrimination based on relgious observance).

Certainly possible, and definitely desirable. If this was the only way in which integration of individuals as equal members of French society would be tried, it would be a failure. I’m not sure, though, that just because the French government might not be doing everything, what it is doing should be disqualified on grounds of being insufficient.

So, altogether, I think the law is a misogynistic way to promote secularism, a suboptimal way to empower women, and clumsily and insensitively handled regardless.

I doubt that misogyny is involved inasmuch as this addresses problems specific to women, I’m aware it’s not as uniformly successful as it could be but alternative measures that wouldn’t ratify Islamist hegemony are unacceptable, and all state interventions into culture tend to be politicized by their very nature.

You seem to be focusing on the law as a women’s empowerment measure, not as a vehicle for secularism. (These are two separate issues. If it were clear that religious people are not sexist, some Frenchmen would still argue that the law is necessary. But, from your arguments, I take it you would not).

I would argue that the law is also a sub-optimal tool to empower women. The headscarf itself is not inherently anti-woman apparel (which should be obvious from your recent trip to Ottawa). The context in which women are forced to wear it.

For some, it definitely limits their autonomy. For others that is not the case. The former may benefit from the French law, the latter suffer. I think it is possible to design a policy response to benefit the former group of women while doing no harm to the latter.

That fact alone makes it a bad law. But even if the government wanted to go ahead with a bad law, they could have packaged it is such a way to recognize that the headscarf is not inherently anti-woman, and that the government will to whatever it takes to mitigate the attendent damage(ie. to beef up laws prohibiting job discrimination based on relgious observance).

So, altogether, I think the law is a misogynistic way to promote secularism, a suboptimal way to empower women, and clumsily and insensitively handled regardless.

The French have chosen wisely that the curriculum (in terms of knowledge and values, based on rationality) are of more importance. In public school everybody is equal, male-female, Muslim-Christian etc. What denominations prefer in their private life is up to them.
The Law is for all French people equal, so is the public schoolsystem.

Ha, beautiful.

So, to recap, all advocates of this law are not only intolerant, possibly racist, and definitely too annoying – they’re also mysoginists.

Including those 70% of French citizens, among which one presumes that approximately half will be women; and 40% to 54% of French Muslim women who also support this law.

Ignoring the existence and motivations of those views is clearly not mysoginistic, nah!

(Just like ignoring the fundamentalists are only a small fraction of Muslims in France is not prejudiced and patronising towards Muslims, nah!)

Those French and French Muslim women, and all the men who support this law, must all hate women. Indeed.

And why? Because they don’t allow fundamentalist men to get their way in turning the rules of equality and secularism in state schools upside down.

Absolutely flawless logic.

Because there’ll be some people who are so fanatical that they will not comply with a basic requirement of not forcing their younger kids to wear a veil and behave like segregated second-class citizens, will refuse the option of allowing them a space of emancipation, and instead impose on those kids the option of religious schools – an option already available to all and which the state cannot prevent -, it follows that the state, which exists to make rules for everybody, should give up on its rules for everybody, and let the fundamentalists – a minority within the Muslim community – have their cake and eat it too: send their girls to a school that complies with their own religious dictates instead of the state’s own laws, and for free.

Give up on the chance to offer all girls a space of emancipation, to allow the fathers of some girls to turn that space into a space of division and disequality for all.

This is sooo not mysoginistic, nah!

Let state schools be fundamentalised, in order to “compete” with fundamentalists and religious schools.

We might as well abolish state education.

Oh, except it’s free… tsk.

We might as well protest religious schools are not subsidised by the state, a clear form of discrimination… Oh, except they are subsidized.

Such solid argumentation, with such clear anti-mysoginistic principles, and such a solid legal basis, that I can’t but acknowledge the fundamentalists who issue fatwas against this law are geniuses, and I can’t wait til they get to power and legislate on everything… Oh wait, they do, in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, where women enjoy wonderful equality because the mysoginist secularists have been silenced or put to death. Hey, if that’s what it takes to defeat mysoginy, so be it…

What Henry Farrell said, over at Crooked Timber, about legislation against pervasive social customs giving people subject to these customs a legitimate excuse to break from them.

But I have seen no sign that the government is France is trying accomodate and empower what it would consider to be ‘fundamentalist’ (i.e. headscarf wearing) women. And in contrast, it has done nothing to limit the ‘fundamentalist’ religious expression of Muslim men (see the bushy muslim beards).

Inasmuch as the hijab, as identified by fundamentalists and conservatives, works rather more drastically to limit female autonomy and freedom than the male beard, it isn’t misogynistic to focus on the hijab as rather more of a threat. hijab /= beard in this respect. Also, inasmuch as the publically-funded Catholic school system is operating as a sort of non-denominational religious school system, there is accomodation. Just not in a secular school system which has been actively hostile to religious symbolism since the 1930s.

(Any parallels here with Reg 17 and the Manitoba Schools Act. Were the Orangemen right about Catholic Schools?)

No, inasmuch as all schools involved religious content as an integral part of the curriculum, and Anglicanism and other Protestantisms were hardly kinder to religious minorities or women than Roman Catholicism. (We’ve evolved since then.)

Indeed. I couldn’t argue with that. The problem here is that the French law contrains the victims and does nothing to actively constrain the victimizers.

So women being co-erced by men to cover themselves up cannot respond by arguing that they have freedom to dress as they wish. Their response is instead that state co-ercion trumps male co-ercion. This is not empowerment, it’s paternalism.

Allowing the imposition of a regressive dress code by an unrepresentative minority, with threats of sexual assault if they dissent, simply isn’t acceptable

Yes. No disagreement. The question is how France will deal with women (and girls) who volountarily choose to wear the regressive dress. The headscarf is seen by many women not as symbol, but as an act of faith (like Mass, not like wearing a cross). A government interested in empowering women would give these women a way to complete their schooling. (And perhaps, de facto, the Cathiolic schools system will do this. But by accident, not by design.)

But I have seen no sign that the government is France is trying accomodate and empower what it would consider to be ‘fundamentalist’ (i.e. headscarf wearing) women. And in contrast, it has done nothing to limit the ‘fundamentalist’ religious expression of Muslim men (see the bushy muslim beards). That’s why I consider the law, and its advocates, to be misogynists.

(Any parallels here with Reg 17 and the Manitoba Schools Act. Were the Orangemen right about Catholic Schools?)

The misogynists would encourage women to stay home, not leave the house after dark. The better response is to ‘take back the night’, and amarhc to that effect is held in September of each year (as I am sure you know).

Indeed. Quite a few French Muslim women have done just that–well, in the French context. Allowing the imposition of a regressive dress code by an unrepresentative minority, with threats of sexual assault if they dissent, simply isn’t acceptable.

To that effect, the government could have set up regular schools and no-hijab schools, giving women the choice.

Cf. the existing, partly publically-funded Catholic school system, which appears to be mutating into a religious school system generally.

Or, best of all, they could have tackled the root of the problem — Men.

What Ginger said about it not being all men generally, nor all French Muslim men, but a militant minority unwilling to allow these young women in the secular public school system appropriate freedom of choice within the school.

It can be entirely compatible with a liberal society–if illiberal groups are threatening people in a liberal society, far better to actively constrain the victimizers than to passively allow the subordination of the victims. It’d be an easy thing to do in France–God knows that the banlieues specifically and French Muslims generally have been neglected over the past generation. It’s time that French Muslim women be allowed to enjoy the same rights to autonomy and freedom as their Christian, Jewish, and secular counterparts.

So a country with its own state schools open and free to all should set up a parallel set of schools only to cater to the needs of one small but vocal set of fundamentalists?

And all this with whose money?

Or they could have subsidized private education for women driven out fo school by the prohibition on Muslim women (of a certain type).

See above.

Plus, all religious schools already (sadly) get state subsidies from the state.

Plus, there is no “prohibition of women”. There is a rule all have to respect.

Take some history and law classes, it might help…

Or, best of all, they could have tackled the root of the problem — Men.

Ha, really? and tackle how?

It’s not men, it’s not French Muslims, it’s not “all” or “most”. It’s “some” – an ideological, radicalised group of fundamentalists, also spurred in this campaign of theirs by the mullahs in Cairo and Islamabad, who have already issued fatwas against this law.

And you are right that wearing a Hijab is not just a religious practice (like Mass), it is also a symbol of resurgent ethnic identity and religious pride.

Randy — Kingston is a town with a lot of prisons, and a fair number of prisoners out on furlough on any given day. Sometimes, as in any city, there are violent crimes against women. The misogynists would encourage women to stay home, not leave the house after dark. The better response is to ‘take back the night’, and amarhc to that effect is held in September of each year (as I am sure you know).

Similar things happen in Montreal, and there women also undertake a safety audit, and then lobby the city for more lights, etc — to make the streets safer so that women need not be afraid of violent crime.

The best response to gender violence and gender co-ercion is empowerment. To ‘take back the night’. That first best policy response is the same in Kingston as in Paris.

To that effect, the government could have set up regular schools and no-hijab schools, giving women the choice. Or they could have subsidized private education for women driven out fo school by the prohibition on Muslim women (of a certain type). Or, best of all, they could have tackled the root of the problem — Men.

They did none of these empowering things, what conclusion could one come to other than that France is not interested in the safety and welfare of women.

(On a side note, I see that Saar will be the fifth German Lander to ban headscarves. Unlike in France, German states make no pretense of religious neutrality.)