"Bottoms" Out

Not that I think France is a place where fundamentalist Christians dream about moving to but the country is taking even greater strides to keep those of a conservative nation (religiously speaking) at bay. According to Reuters via MSNBC, the Council of State (a French high court) has put the kibosh on a Moroccan woman's attempt to gain French citizenship. The grounds for rejection were due to their take on the 32-year old woman's adherence to the orthodox Muslim religious practice of wearing a burqa and living in submission to her husband and male relatives. Per the court:

"She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes," said a ruling by the Council of State handed down last month and sent to Reuters on Friday to confirm a report in Le Monde.

[snip]

"She has no idea about the secular state or the right to vote. She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind," Emmanuelle Prada-Bordenave wrote.

My guess is that the fundies here and abroad will find this ruling as a reason to praise the French (they are, after all, standing up to the European version of the brown menace) and even suggest the US take the same sort of stance in a similar situation. The richness of a Christian fundamentalist argument against the religious orthodoxy of another religion/denomination is how they miss the obvious similarities with their own beliefs.


Tags: religion Christian France Islam freedom of religion

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