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State Neutrality vs. State Hostility
President Obama recently criticized a French law that prohibits Muslim girls and women from wearing body- and face-covering garments in public schools.But French President Sarkozy this week gave his support to attempts to bar Muslim women from wearing body-cloaking robes such as the burqa. What's your view? Is this a private religious matter or a public/government one? Is the burqa welcome in America?
The concept of church-state separation can take several forms, but two basic models are common. First is what may be referred to as a friendly separation. This involves the institutional and, to some extent, the functional separation between church and state where government assumes a posture of "benevolent neutrality" toward religion, to use a phrase coined by the U.S. Supreme Court. A secular government does not necessarily mean a secular culture. In fact, it often results in greater religiosity and religious pluralism. This is the one we enjoy the United States.
Church-state separation can also result in a separation that is more antagonistic to religion. Although the institutions of church and state are separate, the state is not neutral toward religion but, in many cases, hostile to it. The justification is the interest in encouraging not only a secular government but also a secular culture. I think this is more the model that is practiced in France and in other western European democracies.
This difference in the understanding of the proper relationship between church and state is highlighted by the remarks of our countries' two leaders. President Obama (rightly in my view) says that the government should not be able to dictate what people of faith wear, whether it is a burqa, a yarmulke or other religious garb. President Sarkozy, on the other hand, has sought to influence, indeed dictate, religious expression of some his country's Muslim citizens. And even if he is correct that Muslim women wear a burqa under duress or coercion, that dispute is a religious one that needs to be worked out within the confines of Islam, not a political issue to be decided by the French government. (This would be tantamount to American politicians seeking to resolve the internecine battles within the Southern Baptist Convention over the past 30 years.)
In short, robust religious liberty accords every person to right to believe as he or she chooses and to exercise or express those beliefs in visible ways, including through religious garb and displaying religious symbols. To the degree government interferes with that practice, absent a compelling interest for doing it and a failure to do so in a narrowly tailored way, religious liberty is diminished and human rights impaired.
By
J. Brent Walker
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June 25, 2009; 3:21 PM ET
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Posted by: Br0nwyn | June 25, 2009 4:51 PM
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Religious pluralism has never been an entitlement to oppress and dehumanize another. Our laws have had no problem in restraining the human desire and tendancy to tyranny even when it is dressed in religious garb. No mater how tenderly you love your children and believe in the power of God to heal, we do not allow a religious parent to take away a child's life by withoding medicine, if ordinary medical intervention can the child. You try to make the isue simple and it is not.
The trouble with your column is that you deliberately ignore the reality that Sarkhozy bravely confronts. This religious practce of requiring the shrouding of woemn, is destructive of the well- being of those who engage in it and of the French society in which equality and fredom for women is a pillar. Obama has the same facile and self-serving approach to women's freedom when it requires Islam to be restrained.
Recall that a contract to enslave oneself to another is null and void in American jurisprudence. Some might consider that a lack of freedom. They would fail to realize that the more fundamental principle is American hostility to slavery and the freedom to be enslaved or to enslave others must bow. This means that you are not free to be a slave or to expect that society will not restrain your desire to impose the badges of slavery on others. Our laws were built by a group of men who believeed that the human tendency to despotism must be restrained. The power of government must weigh in against this powerful enslavement of Muslim women which removes them from interaction with society all their lives. Their very faces cut off from the world of human beings. Your human rights arguments are made in the air . They do not confront the real situation and are therefore unpersuasive.