WALDHEIM

I've been meaning to link to this post on head scarves in France by Jacob Remes for a while. He reports on some discussions he's had with a French relative and her friends, and then compares the current French attempts to ban traditional religious symbols (especially muslim symbols) from the public sphere with the attempts made in the U.S. in the early 20th century to "Americanize" immigrants from southern and eastern europe. I'm still a bit shell-shocked from teaching U.S. free exercise cases again in my civil liberties class, and thinking about the California Supreme Court's Catholic Charities decision (see here, here and here), so I have to admit that my ideas are in flux here. I still believe that one of the basic categories for analyzing these kinds of conflicts has to be "power," or, more particularly, the multiple consequences of a lack of power. In that respect, I have sympathies with an approach that carves out exceptions from generally applicable laws for religious and cultural minorities. But I also think that there are certain kinds of goods that government has an interest in promoting among its citizens, and these goods sometimes are rejected for religious reasons; the Amish didn't want to send their kids to school but the state of Wisconsin did, partly because the state believed, apparently, that individual citizens need to have the ability to reject their particular religious subcultures, and that ability is contingent upon having skills that are available (theoretically) in public school. The French state takes an even more aggressive stance: individual citizens must be able to strip down to a kind of secular essence whenever they enter the public sphere. Both Wisconsin and Paris are exercising power to the disadvantage of minorities, but both also make claims that there are certain kinds of political boundaries on the ability of religious and cultural groups to form citizens. Is secular citizenship in the public sphere a good that I think that the French state should enforce? I don't know. For now, I'm going to flee into the realm of "the facts" and say that I'd need to know more about both situations to decide where my sympathies lie.

On another note, Jacob also posts on the relationship between Swiss banks and the holocaust, and this is a good time to remind readers to check out Duerrenmatt, my favorite 20th centurty German-language dramatist. See my post on Duerrenmatt and Pahlanuik here.