Given that traditional academic clothing, mortarboard hat and black robe, has religious origins, does that mean that it is now illegal for French scholars or teachers to dress as scholars?
Also, since it is traditional for American high school students to graduate wearing mortarboard and cape, perhaps the students of the American School of Paris would be expelled were they at a public school.
Perhaps next time professors parade around the Sorbonne in traditional garb for a formal occasion, someone should test France’s proposed law and demand their expulsion.
Satire aside, this excellent New York Times article outlines some of the real complexities of the issue.
1. It is backed by the head of the Paris Mosque who:
“praised today’s vote as “impressive” and a “buffer” against Muslim fundamentalists intruding into French secular institutions”
2. Communism has been historically agressively secular but French Communists are among the few detractors of the secular laws:
“Alain Bocquet, a Communist Party deputy who voted against the law, said that it will ‘stigmatize’ citizens of immigrant origin and ‘set things on fire rather than calm them down.'”
3. The law is a part of the move to secure teaching of issues which are objected to by some, including Evolution and the history of the Holocaust.
“at the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox Jews in the Paris suburb of Gagny, which receives state funding and was vandalized in an arson attack last November, evolution is taught as a theory, not as fact.”
but more serious is this:
“teachers have complained that some Muslim students have been so disruptive in rejecting the veracity of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews that it is impossible to teach the subject”
4. Non public, religious schools, which do in fact get state funding, will not be held to the law.
“Despite France’s insistence that secularism must govern French schools, there are exceptions. France spends billions of dollars a year to fund private religious schools, mostly to pay teachers’ salaries, for example.”