France goes to the extreme level of saying "You can't even wear your religious clothing inside the school, even if you feel naked without it."
How would you define liberalism?
I guess Americans would take offense to this view, but I find wearing religious clothing in a public institution such as a school incredibly obnoxious and pushy -- it's akin to your professor suddenly starting to push his/her political views onto you in an unrelated lecture, or something.
It's not that it's bad to wear religious clothing or have political opinions -- it's just that a school should be a place of learning, not propaganda.
As an American, I think of nothing when people wear hijab or whatever, and trust me, I am an atheist who think religion is irrational and that humanity would be better off without it.
Maybe the French would be better off thinking nothing of it when someone wears religious clothing, just as we are starting to think nothing of it when people are gay or transgender or whatever.
I see it as clearly unnecessary/voluntary (so it's quite different from being gay like in your example), so it's an attempt to advertise, which leaves a bad taste in a place like a school.
You'd get a bit of flack if you wore a conservative shirt in an extremely liberal environment and vice versa.
But prohibiting the wearing of religious clothing IS pushing political views.
Still, if you'd want to put up legal barriers to displays of religion, you'd certainly need to find better reasons than "it makes people seem very arrogant" ;)
Schools, being places of science, might mandate non-religious clothing in the same way monasteries and temples should be free to set clothing regulation inside their premises.
Je suis Charlie
I think they go way too far, and a that some of it is bigotry hiding behind the excuse of secularism, but it illustrates that determining what sufficiently negatively "affects others" to be worth sanction can be used to reach widely different conclusions..
I think we should throw all this religion in the toilet and flush.
The principle governing French secularism - laïcité [1] - has its origin in freeing people from being subjected to the influence of the Catholic church. It's a such a direct reaction to religion being pushed onto people in the public sphere by putting in place restrictions aimed at severely curtailing religious influence in government and education.
In this context, it's worth noting that Turkish secularism was explicitly modelled by Ataturk on French laïcité. E.g. Turkey, like France, is constitutionally a secular republic.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/03/hengame...
Democracy is like technology, morally neutral yet capable of great good or terrible inhumanity.
But my point was not that one system is 'better' or 'worse' but that religious head-wear should not be seen as some inalienable right that we have to accommodate to remain a free society. Even if many young Iranian women may feel 'naked' without it, it only took the religious dictators there one generation to make them forget how it used to be.