Piling on Jacques

I quote from The Economist's editorial on Chirac's plan to ban headscarves, yarmulkes and crucifixes in schools, taking an expedient viewpoint:

One way to make the task [of cultural integration] harder is to alienate people who could be allies, such as religious leaders (the government is rightly worried that some imams are zealots whose values reflect the countries of North Africa and the Middle East in which they trained, not Europe). But another group, the young, may be more important: they are France's future. And one way to alienate the young is to forbid them to wear something: at once the wearing of it becomes an act of defiance. Thus Muslim girls will see the headscarf as a mark of their separate identity and a rejection of the rules imposed on them by an oppressive majority—just as Muslim girls in such countries as Iran, where the headscarf is obligatory in public places, see bare-headedness as a rejection of intolerant authority.

The better argument is the moral one, laid out below by Travis, but this one is interesting as well. The Economist may well be right about this, and if so it's a great example of the unintended consequences that come when government screws around where it doesn't belong. And one place (or three places), where it does not belong is the mosque, church, and synagouge.
- posted by Anonymous @ 11:06 PM