Pupils will be banned from wearing abayas, loose-fitting full-length robes worn by some Muslim women, in France’s state-run schools, the education minister has said.
The rule will be applied as soon as the new school year starts on 4 September.
France has a strict ban on religious signs in state schools and government buildings, arguing that they violate secular laws.
Wearing a headscarf has been banned since 2004 in state-run schools.
It’s been part of France’s political culture that religious signification has no place in public institutions. Given that Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Britain offer ways to religious groups to punish others through the legal system for not accepting their criteria regarding what constitutes legitimate criticism [*], but France doesn’t, I’d argue that France is doing something right.
In 2018, a youth in Spain was condemned to pay 480€ for publishing an edited photograph of a Christ image with his own face.
This event emboldened fanatic religious organizations, which sought charges against an actor for saying “I shit on God and Virgin Mary!” in a restaurant. Fortunately he wasn’t declared guilty, but he suffered a judicial process of 2 years. This doesn’t mean they didn’t achieve their goal: they sent everyone the message that you should think twice the next time you consider you have freedom of expression.
If you let religious people think their beliefs must be protected from any criticism, many of them will start to see their privilege as the norm, and eventually encroach the freedoms of everyone else.
Yeah honestly. As much as we’ve struggled with developing and even enforcing it today, I think America has a good balance between freedom to practice and freedom from state sponsored religion
Probably not the best moment in that country’s history to make that claim
https://web.archive.org/web/20230719103441/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/opinion/supreme-court-religion.html