France’s phobia follies

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s has proposed to ban the wearing of burqas while accessing public services. This includes mass transit, hospital services and public schools among others.

The proposal is nothing more than a thinly veiled political stunt. The intention is to steal votes from the far-right National Front (an extremist political party whose leader openly admits torturing Algerians “because it was necessary”) ahead of regional elections in which the President’s party is projected to lose seats.    

The President’s party (the Union for a Popular Movement) is projected to receive 27 percent of the national vote, while it received 33 percent in the last election, held in 2004. This proposal is Islamophobic and should be defeated.

It’s worth noting that the French notion of secularism is much stronger than that of the United States’ separation of church and state, and is focused on keeping religious displays entirely out of the public arena. France already has many laws limiting ostentatious religious expression in public, especially among public employees.

But even given this history of keeping religious displays out of public, this proposal goes too far. It’s an unnecessary infringement on individual liberties of expression and religion and unfairly denies French citizens access to public services to which they are entitled.

It’s not exactly as if there were millions of French Muslims parading around with full-body veils. According to the French government’s calculations, about 1,900 women (out of some 65 million French) in France regularly wear a burqa, and many of them have decided to do so of their own volition, not through coercion.

While requiring a woman to wear a burqa in public is offensive and oppressive, what’s happening in France is not even close to that situation and isn’t an exploding trend that needs to be curbed.

Denying an entire class of citizens its right to access public services (including hospitals) entirely because of the clothes they happen to be wearing is simply cruel and unsupportable.

Political ploys should not cost citizens their right to individual expression, and they should certainly not cost them their right to access hospitals or other basic public services.

Instead of trying to distract the population from the government’s inability to lower unemployment, the French government should start tackling real issues that are actually affecting real French people.

Banning the burqa is a pointless and dangerous distraction whose only goal is to score political points ahead of an election in which the President’s party is expecting to fail.