lavendersparkle | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Why exactly is Radio 4 allowing people on it's programmes who don't just believe in but have actively participated making education and employment conditional upon stripping for real women and talking to him as if he's a normal rational human being rather than a racist shit bag?

I have one thing to say to all the people who very calmly intellectually discuss how they have a lot of sympathy for the French policies which would exclude me and my children from education and almost every job I've ever held:
Fuck you!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I had heard the story about making women apply for jobs as strippers or lose unemployment benefits was just a myth, but if they were talking about it on the radio maybe it's back. (Though when I heard the story circulating and then being debunked, it was Germany, not France.) I agree it's racist to rationalize that with the excuse that people from other countries have different attitudes to body modesty and it's not like making an English woman to apply for a stripping job, though.

The person I was referring to was a French academic who had participated in banning hijabs in school, so he was partly responsible for making French education conditional upon girls stripping i.e. taking off items of clothing to expose parts of their body which they do not want to expose in public. He was on Start the Week proudly informing us that we wouldn't have had terrorist bombings in the UK if we'd removed women's freedom of religion/education/expression in a similar way. I was amazed none of the other guests took they opportunity to call him fucking scum bag.

Seeing as we're talking about France here and it's tagged "religion", I reckon someone on Radio 4 was talking about this, although I can see how the reference to stripping might throw you.

While I think France has gone too far, and prefer UK policies such as allowing Sikhs to wear turbans instead of crash helmets, such a policy isn't excluding someone in the same way as discriminating on skin colour, because religious accoutrements are a matter of choice.

Yes. I suppose it's only on a par with discriminating against people who are actively queer...

If being actively queer was something which broke rules people had made for other good reasons, then it would be. I don't think discrimination against actively gay people is a good thing, and if other laws which weren't targeting gays specifically affected them anyway (although I can't think of a good example for all actively gay people, probably because I'm not gay), I think there'd be grounds for exceptions because being gay is not a choice, and, secondarily, even if it were, preventing people from expressing it will make them very unhappy.

With crash helmets and school uniforms, I can see good reasons for the rules, and the question then becomes what are reasonable grounds for exceptions. A rule that says "we like everyone to have a uniform appearance, so everyone here must have white skin" seems worse than "..., so no visible religious symbols" to me, in part because it does target something about a person they cannot change. With stuff that's a choice, however much it's tempting to say "'My Invisible Magic Friend says so' is not an argument", religion is closer to people's hearts than a general dress preference, and rule makers shouldn't be cruel for the sake of it. Hence the Sikhs and the crash helmets. But I think this argument from strong feelings is weaker than the one from stuff people cannot change. At some point rule-makers must consider which exceptions are reasonable, and how much to privilege religious feelings above politically libertarian ones, say.

In the French case, the rule makers explicitly wanted a secular system, for what at they consider good reasons, and made the rules to keep out expressions of Catholicism even at the expense of hurting Catholic feelings (and perhaps specifically to do so, making it a bit different from British cases). These rules now apply to Muslims too. I doubt banning hijabs has prevented terrorism (it seems more likely that France has avoided being seen as an ally of the USA, and that French intelligence services are models of cold blooded efficiency, from what I remember reading), but it has kept French public institutions overtly secular. I think if I ran France, I'd offer people who refused to keep the uniform rules a tax rebate, but that doesn't sound very socialist, so perhaps they wouldn't go for it.

I can't off the top of my head think of a better reason for "we like everyone to have a uniform appearance" than I can for "we like potential adoptive parents to fit the socially conventional model of a family"

Speaking as a queer, recently Christian, agnostic atheist, I didn't have any more choice about believing in God than I do about fancying all genders. If anything choosing not to do what I thought God wanted me to do would be harder than choosing not to do what I wanted to do, no matter how hot girls are.

In the French case, the rule makers explicitly wanted a secular system, for what at they consider good reasons

Well yes, and people wanted segregation and prop 8 and to prevent women's sufferage for what they considered good reasons.

Should we give them a platform for their views too?

Just to clarify, French schools don't have school uniforms. The only rule is that they can't wear 'visible religious symbols'. So it's not a matter of us nasty G@d botherers wanting special treatment, it's a matter of French girls who are having bad hair days or thinks scarves are fashionable being able to wear them unless there's a suspicion that she might be doing it to please Allah, in which case she has to expose her hair for all the good French men to see if she wants to go to school.

Ah, got it, thanks both of you. I think the whole policy that classed headscarves as religious symbols was dubious in the first place, though at least arguable. But claiming that headscarves cause terrorism is inexcusably racist (I don't have any time for the argument that islamophobia isn't racism because some Muslims are white).

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only