Wearing the Veil
According to the BBC, the French Immigration Minister yesterday rejected a man’s citizenship application because he forced his French wife to wear a head-to-toe Islamic veil, citing naturalization law that requires anyone seeking citizenship to “demonstrate a desire for integration.”
France officially does not recognize race or ethnicity, holding that citizens are simply and completely French. The argument against the veil, presumably, is that requiring the veil deprives a woman of rights and so violates the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, on which the republic is founded.
Although their refusal to recognize ethnicity seems to have caused them some problems, notably in their official inability to treat a poorly assimilated group differently from a well assimilated one and so tend to their specific integration needs, the general attitude is laudable: We are French, not hyphenated-French.
We think, or we thought, that the U.S.A. had been better at integrating our immigrant population into mainstream culture than most of Europe, but recent acts of home-grown terrorists should cause us to reconsider how good we are at it.
And we should also wonder if the conflict between the values of a liberal, secular culture and fundamentalist, religious one aren’t just intractable.
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