Reading The Gazette fills me with rage (multi-rant)

The BBQ Pit
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Really? I never realized that… I was an altar girl when I was younger… I seem to recall that when asked for volunteers to be altar servers the only people in my parish who volunteered was… 2 girls and a boy. Kinda hard to have enough servers when the boys don’t want to and the girls are the only ones willing.

I don’t know but I’d have to say I never experienced much ‘joyful noises’ in a Catholic church… dancing? clapping? I’ve never seen that except in churchs that weren’t Catholic! The music was always too solemn to do anything of the sort unless it was for something like grade 9 graduation.

Meteorshower it’s been my experience that all schools have a hat ban (with the exceptions of turbans and hijabs) and we were not allowed to wear any sort of ball caps, hats, hoods, bandannas etc.

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I think the Vatican has officially banned altar girls for a while. It’s just that a lot of American churches ignore the ban, and the Vatican ignores them ignoring the ban.

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You’re welcome. The easiest way to get to the smilies (until you have them memorized, that is :D) is at the bottom of the page, you’ll see a box titled “Forum rules”. Click on the smilies link.

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Or preview your post. They’re over on the left.

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Salut Meteorshower. Fais-toi’s en pas, tu te débrouilles pas mal mieux que moi je le fais en français :slight_smile:

I guess I still don’t see how the “fucking Quebecois xenophobes” comment was especially helpful, any more than a “fucking English-Canadian xenophobes” or “fucking gay xenophobes” comment would be helpful in a comparable situation. But I’m prepared to be convinced.

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It wasn’t meant to be helpful, matt. It was meant to relieve my burning rage. detop and Grey have explained why it sprung to my mind so readily.

And meteorshower, I can see what you mean by “distracting hairstyles”, but the fact is that to not give religious items special consideration over fashion statements is racist (imperialist, to be specific). Imagine a school principle telling Sikh new Canadians that their son can’t wear a turban to school for the same reason that Billy McWhitey can’t dye his hair magenta!
In Ontario, the Royal Canadian Legion elected not to exclude yarmulkes and turbans from its “no headwear” rule. It was understood that it was their way of keeping the Legion white, white, white and Xian, Xian, Xian. And it worked beautifully, too. So pardon me if I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt.

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It wasn’t meant to be helpful, matt. It was meant to relieve my burning rage. detop and Grey have explained why it sprung to my mind so readily.

And meteorshower, I can see what you mean by “distracting hairstyles”, but the fact is that to not give religious items special consideration over fashion statements is racist (imperialist, to be specific). Imagine a school principle telling Sikh new Canadians that their son can’t wear a turban to school for the same reason that Billy McWhitey can’t dye his hair magenta!
In Ontario, the Royal Canadian Legion elected not to exclude yarmulkes and turbans from its “no headwear” rule. It was understood that it was their way of keeping the Legion white, white, white and Xian, Xian, Xian. And it worked beautifully, too. So pardon me if I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt.

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Thanks, detop and Grey.

Fear of change. It immobilises humans eastbound and westbound, and the other way around. Someone once said something like “ignorance engenders aggressivity”. It sounds right in the religious dilemnas Montréal is facing.

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Because this is xenophobia of the pur laine / “le Québec au Québécois” / “argent et le vote ethnique” variety, and I’ve been well aware of it for as long as I’ve lived here. Sorry, matt, but I agree with Cerowyn. Try not to flip out so easily.

It makes me ill.

Why is it acceptable to refer to an Asian man as “le p’tit chinois” in polite conversation? (The offensive part being petit, never mind if he’s actually Chinese, but hey, does it matter to the average Québécois de souche?) When I worked in primarily francophone offices downtown, I’d hear it all the time. If I were to refer to an Asian man as “that little Chinaman”… well, that would not be acceptable, would it? But I hear le/la p’tit(e) chinois(e) or le 'ti nèg or c’est pas mal juif, ça … and no one bats an eye.

detop is bang on about the us vs. them mentality that has been drilled into generations here. I love it here, but for all of Quebec’s progressive social policies, it’s still a very, very racist society. And my personal opinion is that the separation cause is a fundamentally racist and anti-semitic one. But that’s a debate for another day. This whole hijab thing? It’s sad that I wasn’t surprised when I heard this. Really sad.

We might have a nice metro system and anti-queer discrimination laws since 1976 (or whatever) and gay civil unions, but this ain’t paradise.

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Listen, you think I’m not aware that there are xenophobes in Quebec? Of course there are xenophobes in Quebec. There are xenophobes in Prince Edward Island, for godsakes. I guess I just see something ironic about accusing an ethnicity of ethnic discrimination, that’s all.

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From what I remember, there had been a ban on female acolytes (the official RCC term for them, IIRC) because of (again, IIRC) that whole in persona Christi thing and also the fact that the 12 apostles listed in the Gospels were all male.

Some … 7? 8? years ago (while I was in high school, which was '95 to '99, and well before I graduated), the pope issued some sort of statement saying that people didn’t necessarily have to follow that if the presiding bishop didn’t think it wsa necessary.

And so every single parish in the US, within a year, started having female altar servers. Some almost immediately following the quasi-proclamation, some not long after.

Except Lincoln, Nebraska, and, ironically enough, Fairfax, VA.

As far as I know, the practice in Fairfax is still as it was then, though if anyone honestly cares at this point (I don’t much, since I am no longer there and do not have to worry about it) I’ll ask my mother. No idea about Lincoln, Nebraska.

Here is a slightly helpful cite, which has my years off (in my defense, the first mention of this has it starting in 1983, at which point I was not exactly reading my daily Arlington Catholic Herald;)). From the cite:

"When the new 1983 Code of Canon Law dropped the explicit reference to male altar servers, many priests and liturgists saw a new opportunity to promote female altar servers. When it apparently became necessary for the Holy See to deflect some episcopal pressure for female deacons, the ambiguity was at last “clarified” and permission for altar girls was made explicit.

“The revised GIRM indicates that “[t]he function of altar servers is regulated by the norms established by the Bishop for his diocese” (107). The presumption is that girls continue to be permitted to serve at the altar in accordance with the permission granted by the Vatican in 1994. But this should not suggest that bishops have the power to mandate female altar servers. “Function” means what the servers do, not their sex. There is no indication at all that the present confused legislation has changed; bishops may approve but not require female altar servers.”

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But the xenophobia here, it seems to me, is acceptable, because of the tales spun about the oppression by the evil English. Most of said tales are based on truth, but there’s a lot of exaggeration that happens in the re-telling, and when gross inaccuracies make it into history books, that’s scary.

I don’t have a cite, but I recall an incident a few years back where it was found that several high school history, geography, political science etc. textbooks produced in Quebec contained blatant lies about how “Ottawa” (evil Ottawa) treats Quebec so incredibly poorly, while handing other provinces everything on a silver platter, wiping their collective figurative asses if they so desire, while all the while giving Quebec the shaft to the exclusion of all other provinces. This is not the case. But this is what was being taught to young students, if not in the schools, in the home.

So the supposedly noble cause of Quebec independence is, again in my opinion, thinly-veiled xenophobia with a nasty racist and anti-Semitic undercurrent. That’s what separates (no pun inteneded) the xenophobia here from the xenophobia in Bumblefuck, New Brunswick or Timhortons, Ontario. There, it’s just plain ignorance and racism. Here, it’s a political cause.

matt, I know you moved here in 1995, but were you around for the referendum? The comments by Bouchard about there not being enough white babies born in Quebec? How, right after Parizeau’s “money and ethnic vote” comment, my Hispanic friend (though born and raised here), was afraid to walk home alone? How I was scared to wear a “No” pin or a Canadian flag pin lest I be attacked on the street? I was more afraid of being targeted for being a federalist (and on the surface, an anglophone, though I’m actually “bilingual by birth”) than I was of being gay-bashed?

What I’m saying is that when you give an acceptable political cause to such xenophobia, racism, etc. etc., it gets really, really scary. And so far in Canada, that’s happened only in Quebec (the western provinces haven’t gotten their separatist movement together yet). This is why when student-expelled-for-wearing-hijab shit happens here, I don’t just think “hmm, racism” - I also think, “this is a result of xenophobia encouraged by the politics of the last 40 years.”

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scott, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s not that there isn’t xenophobia in the rest of Canada (wherever you find people you find xenophobia, dammit). It’s that the xenophobia is institutionalized. Note that my rants were never directed at individuals, but at institutions, namely a school, a teacher’s union, and the regie d’assurance maladie, if you need a recap.

Vive le Quebec (ha ha) and all that, I mean it’s WAY better than lame-ass Ontario could ever hope to be, but Eden it ain’t.

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I don’t think it’s ironic. I think it’s something that happens. Just because you’re ethnic doesn’t give you the right to discriminate against other ethnicities.

And I wouldn’t call the Québécois an ethnicity. Distinct society, unique culture, yes. But hardly an ethnic group. You can argue the semantics of that all you want.

But if we do want to consider the Québécois an ethnic group for a moment, here’s an example of someone elected to represent said ethnicity doing the ethnic discrimination thing, from here (bolding mine, notice the prevalence on and nous):

Jacques Parizeau, October 30, 1995.

I hardly think by on and nous he was including girls who wear hijabs.

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I suppose I should translate. I’m doing this quickly, on the fly, so it won’t be perfect:

*[Our project for separation] has failed, but not by much. And yet it has succeeded - it has succeeded on a certain level. If you will, we won’t speak of the Francophones of Quebec, alright? We’ll talk about us. We voted YES - 60% of us. We were still beaten, but we still succeeded in clearly indicating what we wanted. But we missed it by a small margin, a few tens of thousands of voices. In a case like this, what do we do? We spit in our hands, and we start over.

[…]

It’s true we were beaten, but by what, fundamentally? By money, and by the ethnic vote, essentially.

[…]

It’s between us, the artists and the students, the union workers and the bosses, the unemployed and the workers - it’s between us that we’ll first of all, in the immediate term, here at least in Quebec, not sacrifice ourselves to the movement towards the right that we see invading the rest of Canada.

[…]

We will show them that we are still capable, even if not as a country, of establishing a French society whose heart is committed to hard work, and whose heart is in the right place, until one day, finally, we have our revenge, and give ourselves our own country.*

It’s scary when things like this are said by the elected leader of a province, on national television, in a supposedly more enlightened time.

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For your information, yes, I was around for the referendum; it’s in fact why my family moved here.

An interesting fact is that my dad, the arch-federalist, once got into a fistfight about his views on Quebec sovereignty. Not in Quebec, though - in Winnipeg, where someone thought he was too soft.

But getting back to this - please figure out whom you’re complaining about. Is it the Quebecois or the sovereignists? The groups aren’t identical, you know. The comment I objected to was “fucking Quebecois xenophobes.” It didn’t say anything about sovereignists. Why are you bringing them up?

I’m sorry you felt threatened at referendum time. Emotions were high on all sides, whipped up by both sides in an artificial debate for political gain, and from what I remember certain Anglos were giving as good as they got. A former Montrealer just published a hysterical, shitslinging book about how the fucking peasoups want to take over the world. But you don’t see me calling him a fucking Anglo xenophobe.

It’s certainly true that there are undercurrents (and overcurrents) of racism in the national discourse in this province. And it makes sense to analyze the motivations of a political movement, considering that that’s related to what people believe. But I don’t see what this has to do at all with the Quebecois, as a group, nor with whether it’s legitimate to ascribe xenophobia to the Quebecois. You can’t hold Quebecois opinions any more than you can be of liberal descent.

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And while we’re on the subject, reading The Gazette fills me with rage too, but in my case it’s that I hate how it pretends to be a newspaper.

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Well its that or the Mirror, assuming it still exists.

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It’s not so much that you read too much into what I wrote, matt; rather, I think what I wrote wasn’t meant to be read the way you read it… Know what I mean?

The xenophobes pretended to speak for all “true” Québécois. Those in power had an agenda whose fundamental basis had strong undercurrents of racism. Therefore, these sentiments because institutionalized.

Semantics, semantics, semantics, with a rather condescending:

I don’t think we need to discuss this any further. It’s just not going anywhere. Our perspectives differ more than I thought, and we’ve gotten to debating everything and nothing.

This is the Pit. We should be bitch-slapping each other. Whore.

(Don’t worry, folks, we still get along. I think. :))

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[sub]Slut.[/sub]