Dear Marine Le Pen: that’s not what “secular” means

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s answer to the Tea Party and connoisseur of fine vintage fear-based xenophobia, gave an interview to Al-Jazeera yesterday and offered this commentary on Islam and secular society:

AJ: Do you believe then that, at a certain level, Islam as a religion is in some way incompatible with French values? 

Le Pen: There are some who believe that secularism and Islam are not compatible. But Muslims should show everyone that this is not the case. It’s up to them to show that you can be French and Muslim and still respect secular rules.

And for that we have to oppose all demands that aim to shatter secularism – demands for different clothes, demands for special food, demands for prayer rooms. Demands that create special rules that would allow Muslims to behave differently.

Yeah, that’s not how “secular” works. A truly secular society has to allow for its citizens to worship what, where, and how they choose. Nobody should be forced to dress in “different clothes,” but neither should wearing those different clothes be banned in public places (as it is now in France) or made illegal (as I imagine a President Le Pen would push). Nobody should be forced to eat “special food,” but they should certainly be allowed to eat “special food” if that’s what they want to eat. No business should be forced to designate a prayer room for its workers or customers, but businesses that choose to set such a room aside should do so, and workers and customers should be free to petition businesses to do so. A secularism that outlaws religion is no better than a state religion.

Le Pen’s comment on “special rules” would be bizarre coming from most politicians, though its par for the course coming from a bigot like her. Most Muslims aren’t asking for rules that are any more “special” than the ones everybody should have in a free society: the freedom to dress, eat, and live as they want insofar as the way in which they do those things doesn’t hurt anybody else. Are Muslims behaving “differently” when they exercise those freedoms? What does that even mean? 00Everybody behaves “differently” from everybody else at some time or another; we’re not automatons and we’re not all white Europeans (much to Marine Le Pen’s chagrin, I realize). Are there Muslims who demand more than that, who want their own beliefs and behaviors to trample everyone else’s rights? Sure, and those are the ones who need to be marginalized and dealt with, just like extremists of every stripe. It shouldn’t be hard to find them; aside from their Islamic faith, their basic intolerant ideology is pretty much the same as Marine Le Pen’s.