10th February 2004, 5:32 PM
Its moving forward...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/intern...1FRAN.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/intern...1FRAN.html
Quote:French Assembly Votes to Ban Religious Symbols in Schools
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: February 11, 2004
ARIS, Feb. 10 — The National Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority on Tuesday to ban Muslim head scarves and other religious symbols from public schools, a move that underscores the broad public support for the French secular ideal but is certain to deepen resentment among France's large Muslim population.
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The 494-to-36 vote, with 31 abstentions, came hours after the minister of national education, Luc Ferry, said in a radio interview that the law would stretch much further than religious symbols and require all students to attend physical education classes and accept what is taught on the Holocaust and human reproduction.
Three weeks ago, Mr. Ferry, a philosopher and best-selling author, said bandannas and excessive hairiness would be banned from public schools if they were considered religious signs.
The draft law bans "ostensibly" religious signs, which have been defined by President Jacques Chirac and a government advisory commission as Islamic head scarves, Christian crosses that are too large in size and Jewish skullcaps. Sikh turbans are also likely to be included.
But the legislation also includes a lengthy preamble that demands that public schools guarantee total equality, including "coeducation of all teachings, particularly in sports and physical education." Schools, it said, are "the best tool for planting the roots of the republican idea."
On Tuesday, Mr. Ferry made clear that religious beliefs could not be used as an excuse to avoid gym or biology classes, and that questioning the veracity of the Holocaust would not be tolerated.
Mr. Ferry also said the law "will keep classrooms from being divided up into militant religious communities," noting that there had been a "spectacular rise in racism and anti-Semitism in the past three years."
In recent years, 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.
Teachers have also said some Muslim girls have boycotted classes on human reproduction because they are too graphic, and have demanded sexually segregated gym classes. There are also reports that male and female Muslim students have demanded prayer breaks within the standardized baccalaureate exams at the end of high school and a ban on pork in school cafeterias.
In the Europe 1 interview, Mr. Ferry did not single out Muslims for censure, but he did not have to. Most Orthodox Jewish schoolchildren who would object to mixed-sex gym and biology classes, for example, go to private Jewish schools that are already sex-segregated, keep kosher kitchens and teach the Torah. The first — and only — private Muslim high school in all of France opened last fall in Lille.
Despite France's insistence that secularism must govern French schools, there are exceptions. France spends billions of dollars a year to finance private religious schools, most of them Catholic, for example.
Private religious schools that receive state financing are required to follow the national curriculum strictly, but policing by the state is not universal.
For example, at the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox Jews in the Paris suburb of Gagny, which receives state financing and was vandalized in an arson attack last November, evolution is taught as a theory, not as fact.
"We don't teach that man comes from monkeys," said Jacques Benisty, the school's deputy director, in an interview shortly after the attack.
The Catholic catechism is taught and the crucifix is hung in public schools in Alsace-Lorraine, which is exempt from France's 1905 law strictly separating church and state because the area was still in German hands when it was adopted.
Meanwhile, during a brief debate in Parliament, before the adoption of the law, Alain Bocquet, a Communist Party deputy who voted against the law, said that it would "stigmatize" citizens of immigrant origin and "set things on fire rather than calm them down."
The draft legislation now goes to the Senate, which is also expected to pass it by a wide margin when it votes on March 2.