The French Battle Over Religion
On Wednesday, President Jacques Chirac tried to summon his fellow French citizens back to "the elementary rules of getting along." He was alluding to recent cases in which Muslim men had refused, on religious grounds, to let their hospitalized wives be treated by male doctors. "Nothing," Mr. Chirac said, "can justify a patient's refusing on principle to be treated by a doctor of the other sex."
Hospital etiquette is just one corner of a society-wide debate on religion that is obsessing France. The debate's implicit focus is Islam. While law forbids ethnic and religious identification in the French census, demographers estimate that France has five million Muslims, roughly 8 percent of the population. Most are either immigrants or their offspring.
Many practice an Islam sufficiently fervent to raise worries that it cannot be accommodated within the country's century-old secular traditions, and that the elementary rules of getting along may not be as self-evident as the president assumes. The rules are certainly not self-evident to Americans. Although the French and the American systems of church-state separation have points in common, they stress different freedoms and often produce radically different results.
Get the rest of this New York Times article.
Matt's Chat
The main difference between the US and France on this issue is that in the United States, our law protects the freedom OF religion. In France, and indeed most of Europe, it appears that their seperation of church and state regulations stear toward the freedom FROM religion.Here is a quote from Chirac contained in this article, France must wage a "pitiless battle against xenophobia, racism and, in particular, anti-Semitism." And that sounds all good and cheery, but the problem isn't what he wants to fight against, it is rather, what he wants to fight for: the absense of religion from the lives of France's (and Europe's) citizens.
This sort of rhetoric has a familiar ring to it, liberals in this country use similar language to frame all sorts of ethical and moral issues as being church and state issues. Everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to gay marriage to abortion gets bogged down in a battle for America over something our nation was founded upon: religion.
Religion is a vital part of civilization, without it we risk everything we have fought so long to uphold. Don't let the political correctness of liberals take away that which our Constitution protects.
Mark's Remarks
It is more than just what liberals use in this country, Matt, it reeks of Marxism/Leninism. It reeks of Communism. That is what it is about. The Chiracs and liberals of the world want to replace God (Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc.) with government. They want us to bow down at the government as the all-knowing. Humans run the government, therefore it cannot be all knowing. Therefore, it is not worthy of our worship and praise as deity. Chirac and other liberals are afraid of religion, because it can serve as a medicine to the secular governmentalism of the left. The left remembers how well it was used in the Cold War to fight communism, so now they are launching an assault on it in a different direction. In the name of political correctness, they are trying to eliminate it. How ridiculous.
Also, is it not ironic and in some ways cosmically humorous that the french pm who was so concerned about the welfare and dignity and views of the Islamic folk now is being one of the most repressive regimes in recent history? Hmmm....doesn't smack of hypocrisy, now, does it?
