Peter Northup offers a careful reading of, and response to this defense of the French ban on “ostentatious” religious symbols in schools, written by Patrick Weil, a member of the commission that recommended the ban. Weil argues that the ban is needed to prevent (mainly) students bullying and compelling other students into wearing headscarves. Peter replies that there might have been a case for the ban if the problem was girls being coerced by parents otherwise outside the reach of the school system, but that if the problem is inter-student violence then it should be the violent students, not their victims, who get penalized or restricted.
Weil bemoans the fact that the ban was the only one of twenty-five commission recommendations adopted. He seems genuinely surprised, much after the fashion of people of goodwill who sit on government blue-ribbon commissions everywhere. Chirac convened them more or less explicitly for the purpose of getting a recommendation to ban headscarves. He got it. The mix of other recommendations (some of them commendably multiculturalist, such as an expansion of official holidays to include Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian ones)were no doubt important to the commissioners who understood themselves to be doing something other than rationalizing a ban; but they weren’t of any importance to the French government. What Weil thought he and his fellow commissioners were doing bears relatively little relationship to what Chirac actually is doing. When I first blogged about the proposed law in December, I noted that Chirac had recently called the wearing of headscarves an “assault” against the republic.
The following case seems straightforwardly analogous to me. The governor of a southern state circa 1960 has accepted the integration of the public schools, but refers to interracial dating by students as an assault against the state’s values. A commission is convened, and finds that students involved in interracial dating are routinely threatened or beaten by other students. In sadness more than in anger, and in order to protect the victims, it recommends a ban on interracial dating– or at least on ostentatious displays of same, like holding hands in hallways– along with a number of other reforms to promote improved race relations. The governor does the obviously-expected thing, adoptes the recommendation for the ban and ignores the rest.
The difference, of course, is that in France the government is coercing the targeted students in the opposite direction from what the violent students want, whereas in the hypothetical the government is coercing the targeted students in the same direction. But in both cases, the wrong students are getting coerced, and they’re getting coerced under cover of their own protection by a government that openly wanted rid of the targeted behavior for reasons unrelated to the violence.
UPDATE: Mark Kleiman’s “not persuaded.”
I fail to see the analogy between banning a behavior that is being repressed by violence and banning a behavior that is being enforced by violence.
Russell Arben Fox agrees with Mark about the analogy but agrees with me (I think) about the disconnect between the story about violence and the (unrelated and unsupportable) real reasons why the major officials of state support the ban.
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