Let's be clear about what we're discussing. France prevented a law that would have allowed burkinis to circumvent existing public pool rules that require a swim cap and forbid baggy clothes and certain sun protection suits. People forced to wear certain clothes by others in their religion do not get special exceptions. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna34833
You realize that your citation actually reinforces the idea that the only reason this law was passed was because the government was against them to enforce “secularism”?
No one claimed that they were being “forced” to be part of a religion. What next? Forcing people to eat pork even if it is against their religion to enforce “secularism”?
This was nothing more than discrimination.
In the US, we had to have laws that allowed Black girls to wear their hair the way they wanted and schools were forcing black girls to straighten their hair to fit in.
The pool rules considered no religion and only what is necessary for pool safety and cleanliness. The law that the city passed made concessions for a religion (just one). If your religion requires you to defecate in the pool each time you enter, should they make laws allowing that?
People who are forced to wear certain clothes by others in their religion are also often forced to have that religion.
Confusing race with religion is even crazier. We should accommodate people who are physically different, but there is no reason to go out of our way to accommodate people with arbitrarily wacky beliefs and even less reason to go out of our way to accommodate oppression by people with arbitrarily wacky beliefs.
The pool rules are about sanitation and safety. The law allowing burkinis was removed because "it violates the principle of government neutrality toward religion" by being written to accommodate a single religion.
The secularism rule basically says that the government should not make laws to accommodate one religion because then it would have to make laws to accommodate any and all religions, and there is no limit to how wacky a religion can be.
You can’t believe that. That’s just like saying that laws against “sodomy” weren’t discriminatory and only passed for the welfare of the state when they were clearly passed to criminalize non heterosexual consenting sex between adults.
Once again, there isn't a law against burkinis. There are pool rules that predate the invention of the burkini and disallow many things, wearing burkinis (though not mentioned specifically in the rules) in the pool among them. Writing a law specifically about allowing burkinis is discriminatory against other religions and beliefs.
> The ruling was the first under a controversial law, championed by President Emmanuel Macron, aimed at protecting “republican values” from what his government calls the threat of religious extremism.
Now you're confusing a law passed in a city with a national law. The law passed in the city was specifically making accommodation for one religion, which is not allowed: “the Grenoble vote was made ‘to satisfy a religious demand’ and ‘harms the neutrality of public services.’”
The law passed in the country was set up to disallow laws that favored one religion, but ever since the revolution cast aside Christianity for enlightenment ideals, no such laws had been attempted. It is true that this law was made to prevent laws that favor Islam, but it puts it on equal footing with all other religions. Members of The Native American Church cannot get laws passed to give themselves exemptions to use mescaline.
