Giles Fraser
The Guardian - Friday 16 January 2015
At the start of this year, the school in the little French town of
Sargé-lès-le-Mans instituted a “pork or nothing” policy. Muslim and
Jewish kids have either to eat pork or go hungry. Apparently this move
is necessary to “save secularism”, according to National Front leader Marine le Pen.
“We will accept no religious requirements in the school lunch menus,”
she said. “There is no reason for religion to enter the public sphere.”
The glorious triumph of atheistic rationality over the dangerous
totalitarian obscurantism of the Catholic church is one of the great
foundation myths of republican France.
And coded within this mythology is the message that liberty, equality,
fraternity can flourish only when religion is suppressed from the public
sphere. It is worth remembering what this ideological space-clearing
involved.
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