Saturday, March 15, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
On Tuesday, September 3 2013, the Parti Quebecois-led government of Quebec proposed a new Charter of Values, which would prohibit public service employees from wearing conspicuous religious symbols. A few months earlier, the French opposition party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire proposed a law banning the headscarf from very similar spaces, such as daycares. This law failed, in part because the ruling Parti Socialiste wanted to wait for the report of the newly appointed Observatoire de la laïcité on the same matter. In this paper, we will turn to newspaper reporting, government and party documents to analyze the ways in which these two historically linked Francophone nations are increasingly circumscribing religious expressions in public, even private spaces. We focus on the ways in which political parties mobilize nationalist discourses for party-political gain and show how Muslim citizens become the collateral damage in these conflicts.
