Québec bans face-coverings under guise of “religious neutrality”

Québec has a thinly veiled xenophobia problem, particularly when it comes to Islam and anything remotely Middle Eastern in appearance. The latest salvo is in: The provincial legislature today passed a “religious neutrality” law that not-so-secretly targets Muslims, women in particular, by deciding for them what they may or may not wear in public in everything from using municipal services to riding the bus:

A new law that would effectively force Muslim women who wear a niqab or burka to uncover their faces to use public services is based on a principle "the vast majority of Canadians, and not just Quebecers" can agree on, Premier Philippe Couillard said.

The Liberal government's Bill 62 on religious neutrality was passed Wednesday in Quebec's National Assembly.

"We are just saying that for reasons linked to communication, identification and safety, public services should be given and received with an open face," Couillard told reporters.

First of all, that a majority of people support a position doesn’t make it right. It just makes it populist. Populism can be good or bad, depending on how it’s used, and this clearly falls within the latter category, since it harnesses the disdain of the many to fuel discriminatory laws aimed at the few.

Second, let’s get some perspective here. The 2001 census (the last that asked about religion) showed Muslims made up all of 2% of the Canadian population and 1.5% in Québec in particular. And of that tiny minority, a 2016 survey found that only about 3% of them wear a niqab in public. That’s about 0.045% of the population. Yet we’re supposed to believe that this less-than-a-tenth-of-a-percent of people who wear niqabs or burkas poses such a threat to our democracy that our only recourse is to wield the force of law to ban the practice?

Niqab-related crime and accidents: the biggest problem you’ve never heard of (because it doesn’t exist).

You don’t have to be a fan of face-coverings and the religious ideology behind them (I certainly am not) to still have a problem with the government deciding what people can wear what sorts of religious clothing in public. The idea that this somehow protects people from accidents or prevents fraud is a transparent excuse – sunglasses hinder visibility far more than a face-wrap with open eye-holes, yet no-one’s trying to get rid of them, for some reason. It’s also ludicrous to claim this is to prevent women from being forced into head-wear against their will, since it will equally (I’d argue mostly) penalize women who choose to cover up for whatever reason suits them. You don’t have to agree with those reasons to accept that a free society entails letting people make whatever vestimentary choices they see fit.

It would be just as bullshit if politicians conjured up flimsy pretenses to ban Sikh turbans, or Jewish yarmulkes, and so on. And if the government so much as hinted at banning Christian crucifixes, Quebecers would throw a fit. But this targets a religious group that most people already dislike, so who cares, really. After all, they can just conform! That’s the spirit of religious freedom.

Civil liberties groups, including the Canadian equivalent of the US’s ACLU, also oppose this law. Toronto Star columnist Shree Paradkar also sees through the pretense:

Members of the national assembly voted 66-51 in favour of the idea that the best way to stop women from being forced to wear a particular garment is to force women to not wear that garment.

Bill 62, labelled as “an act to foster adherence to state religious neutrality,” is the face of contemporary dog whistle anti-Islamic politics couched as a unique commitment to secularism. Just leave that crucifix hanging on the wall behind the Quebec parliamentary speaker’s chair, please. That’s historical.

The bill came complete with the thinnest plausible deniability — the law would also apply to masked protesters, Quebec Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée has said. The bill is also supposed to set vaguely defined limits to religious accommodation.

If governments don’t belong in people’s bedrooms, they certainly don’t belong in women’s closets.

[…]

Bill 62 was never about religious neutrality. It is about discomfort with overt Muslim-ness. If the conservative Parti Québécois floated a so-called Charter of Values to ban public servants from wearing all obvious religious symbols, the Liberals targeted the lowest hanging fruit of Islamic womenswear — burkas and niqabs.

Even if we were all to agree to being collectively uncomfortable with the idea of Muslim women — or anybody — covering their faces in the public sphere, how did it become so indecent as to be banned?

[…]

There are no such restrictions for the rest of Quebec’s residents.

Tell me again, what’s the definition of discrimination?

(via @ShreeParadkar; RT: @cancivlib)