On 11/12/03 15:26, in article , "B
Vaughan" wrote:

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:02:55 +0100, Earl Evleth
wrote:

I will comment on those items I felt commenting necessary.


If many young Catholics don't want to go to Mass, the government has no reason
to outlaw going to Mass.

The other items were about excluding visible signs of religious association,
which applies to Christians also as well as any political declartion (like
political buttons for a particular party, etc).

What one does outside the school wearing scarves or going to mass is not
covered under these kinds of laws. If the Moslem girls want to put
their scarves on on leaving the school grounds, nobody is trying to control
that.

4) Educators don`t like displays and especially anything which
interfers with their educational mission. That mission is
to put out ethnically French students, white, black or brown,
they must be French all educated in the same manner.

In other words, ethnically French means purged of all ethnic
diversity? This is the same sort of reasoning that led France to
forbid parents in Brittany giving Breton names to their children.

France has a list of names which you can give you children, yes.

I don`t know of Breton or Basque names are forbidden? This is the
first time I have heard of that. Do you have any information on that
law and how the EU situation might have changed it.

I gave a quick look on the www.google.fr and found nothing quickly.


So how do Muslims girls take the required swimming lessons
with scarves on? The Islamic religious right does not want their girls in
bathing suits much less without their scarves! Other sports activities are
hard to participate in with scarves on. The religious right do not want
their girls taking biology classes where sex is discussed.

In a diverse society, schools have to do their best to accommodate the
beliefs of their various minorities.

First, sports are considered part of the normal program. Swimming is
for safety reasons, or so claimed.

Are they not to be expose to the theory of evolution because it might
offend religious sensitivities? Or the flat earth people. Should society
protect the rights of parents to keep their children ignorant? Or is it the
responsibility of the collectivity to pass over the "rights of the parent"
to protect the "rights of the child" to be educated in the best manner
society seems fit? Unfortunately there is no easy answer to these
questions. Totalitarians societies will override the rights of the parents
but so will "liberal" societies who don`t want culturally crippled children.


More recently, a young girl in New Jersey who was a committed
vegetarian and animal rights activist won in court the right to be
able to study biology without having to dissect animals.

I never liked that part of the course either, especially when we killed
a live frog. Am I am not a kook in that regard. I don`t remember having
learned anything earth shaking from that experiment.

I think we should avoid cruelty in all forms. This include the cruelty
of enforced exclusion.

The Arabs In France are quite sensitized by the Arabophobia present in the
country (and in the US also) and some see the scarf issue as really an
attack in the Islamic and Arab community in France. I have commented here
before that anti-Arab prejudices in France are far greater than anti-Semitic
sentiments in spite of the support in France for the Palestinian people.

So France is going to have a hard time working through this particular
issue. It is not a black and white situation however, which is why I posted
this item to expose the complexity of the issue.

Earl