France is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
My bolding. If France has subsequently rejected these human rights, they really ought to formally withdraw the UDHR and make it clear that only religious practice that is seen as culturally French will be tolerated. This poor woman had no way of knowing that she’d be treated this shabbily by a supposedly liberal country.
It sounds like you don’t believe in the concept of freedom of religion at all, then.
We don’t actually know that she’s Muslim, as the court ruling doesn’t specify.
That said, I would argue that, as a supposedly liberal country, France’s cultural values should include the free exercise of religion. Their version of secularism is Catholic-normative and discriminatory.
Good thing my argument didn’t end with that sentence, then!
Try immigrating to a country to a country whose values are completely antithetical to yours, and try to be inflexible about it and tell them it’s a weak argument to deny you citizenship because of it and see how far it gets you.
How young French culture is and its history is wholly immaterial to their right to deny you citizenship. If they feel you will be actively hostile to their culture due to your backwards and archaic religious beliefs it’s their right to not want to let you in. Visiting a country isn’t even a guaranteed right, so there’s no logical reason for why permanent residence and citizenship should be treated as such.
Translation: I have no real argument so I will accuse my opponent of being racist just because they disagree with me even though they said nothing remotely racist or bigoted because I’m an immature twat.
Perhaps Tumblr would be a better fit for you then this board.
Religion isn’t a race. France denying this woman citizenship isn’t racist. You need to explain how they manage to have so many naturalized French Muslim citizens if this boiled down to Islamophobia. If this was a story about a white Christian evangelical being denied French citizenship for the same reasons, you wouldn’t be crying shrilly about racism, so spare me your faux self-righteousness. By the way, do try to look up the definition of racism, it’s not intended to be brandished as an insult and a trump card in an argument.
There is more than one immigration official in France. Obviously those naturalized French Muslim or naturalized French Orthodox Jews or naturalized French Roma or naturalized French feminists that don’t believe a man should compel a woman to touch him, etc., dealt with adult immigration officials who have good manners and a respect for human boundaries.
Are you as well as everyone else literally overlooking the fact that France has likely thousands of naturalized French Muslim citizens? Do you believe they all feigned not being Muslim in order to obtain citizenship? Are they demanding that their Muslim citizens give up their religion or risk losing citizenship?
It sounds like you’re fond of strawmanning if that’s what you deduced from that sentence. I was highlighting the double standards in some people’s arguments on this issue. I’m anti-theocracy and pro-believe what you want to believe as long as you don’t infringe on the rights of others, however the general attitude here is when in Rome, do as the Romans do or don’t bother going there in the first place… except for when the tables are reversed.
True, there’s very little we know about the actual specifics of the case. We all are drawing our own inferences and making our own conclusions based on the limited available information we have. But this thread would be empty if we waited until we heard more details, so while it’s not an irrelevant point it would render this conversation impossible if we were to shut up and wait until we knew more.
Agreed.
Is it? Not being sarcastic here, genuinely asking. It seems to me they denied this woman citizenship not because she’s Muslim, but because her brand of Islam includes retrograde sexist attitudes that would make everyday interactions with the opposite sex problematic. Now you may argue that it’s no one’s business if they’re sexist or bigoted as long as said bigotry doesn’t lead to them physically harming anyone. But if you choose to practice a religion that normalizes discrimination against an entire gender (or any group of people) and you make that rather obvious when you’re applying for your citizenship/taking your oath while in the process of being naturalized, is it really fair to complain about being the victim of discrimination in that scenario? If this woman wasn’t (presumably, of course) Muslim and merely said “I won’t shake your hand because I don’t like men” and was consequently denied citizenship, would you still be arguing it’s unfair on France’s part?
Yes, freedom of religion is vital to a free and just society, but if someone’s religion gets in the way with fully integrating with a large segment of society all, should those beliefs take precedence no matter what?
If it’s an issue of the whims of whatever immigration officer is on hand, then it’s not an issue of systemic Islamophobia within the immigration department of France. This also assumes the woman in question is the first Muslim person the officer she encountered has had to process.
Iran also has plenty of non-Muslims. The fact oppressive laws are not currently universally enforced does not make them less oppressive
Enforcing a religious practice as prerequisite to citizenship flies in the face of any concept of freedom of religion. Forcing a woman preform a intimate physical act with a man that their religion prohibits to get citizenship is as blatant example of that as forcing someone declare the shahada to get citizenship (I’d argue it is worse personally, there are plenty of perfectly acceptable non religous reasons for not wanting to touch a man).
The fact I have no immediate plans to immigrate to either Saudi Arabia or France does not change that fact. The constitutions of those countries are objective worse than the constitution of the US as those constitutions do not protect fundamental rights that the US constitution does.
I think you’ll find every law on the planet is at the whim of whichever government official is on hand (if you don’t believe this try practicing your constitutionally protected right to yell “pig” at the next cop to pull you over, and see how their “whims” affect what laws they choose to enforce)
The case clearly shows that French law requires, as a prerequisite to citizenship, an intimate physical act with a man that is explicitly prohibited by religious belief. The fact this judgement exists, the French constitution did not prevent it, means everyone in France is included in it. That is how laws work. They don’t just apply to neo-Nazis or Islamic extremists, they apply to everyone regardless of how spottily they are enforced.
The fact it is selectively applied is where the racism comes. I’d say if you are white looking and not wearing obvious non-European garb then this law has much less chance of being applied than if you are an African woman in a hijab.
If one’s religious belief precludes speaking to a male or even standing in the same room as one and they exhibit this belief at the naturalization ceremony, is it still discrimination to deny them citizenship based on that? So their right to discriminate takes precedence over yours? I don’t believe France allows for gender-based discrimination either.
When it comes to immigration, officers are typically given a wide room in terms of determining who is worthy of citizenship and who isn’t. Unless they can prove that this standard is only applied to those of Muslim faith and Muslim POC in particular, there’s not much of basis to claim that this is undue faith-based discrimination.
That is your opinion. A large percentage of the world would disagree with you about that. The state should not have the right to force you to shake someones hand any more than it should have the right to force you to wear a headscarf. Any system of laws that doesn’t protect you from the former is not going to protect you from the latter.
It doesn’t take precedence over mine or yours, or anyone else’s. My religious opinions, and that woman’s, do not effect you in the slightest. The freedom of religion is freedom FROM THE STATE enforcing or banning religious practices by means of the force of law. This is about as cut and dried example of that as you can get.
So being forced to eat a pork chop would be an acceptable prerequisite? It would apply just as much to atheists as Muslims or Jews.
Too bad it’s not a widely held opinion in the western world. You would be iced out of a lot of social and employment opportunities with such a mindset.
France isn’t part of that “large percentage of the world” . And no one was forced to do a handshake. She chose not to shake the immigration officer’s hand, she bore the consequences for it. Unless it can be proven only Muslims are held to that standard (and that remains to be determined) she doesn’t quite have a basis for claiming what happened to her was undue religious discrimination. If someone’s citizenship application gets denied because they rolled their eyes at the immigration officer, is that proof that the law tries to dictate what you do with your eyes? What if it’s because they don’t like what you wore to the interview with the immigration officer? Is the state dictating what you choose to wear too? If it can’t be ascertained that the denial is due in part to anti-religion, sexist or racial bias, you don’t really have grounds to moan about discrimination in the eyes of the law. Immigration officers aren’t required to prove that there is something objectively bad about you that makes you unworthy of citizenship in order to deny you. And if they feel you would fare poorly at integrating yourself in the culture of your new nationality, it’s considered fair grounds for denial of citizenship even if it’s a measure that is largely subjective. It isn’t fair, but that’s how it is.
It’s not really so “cut and dried” given the lack of details on both sides. Still, you have not answered the hypothetical of someone’s religion requiring no contact of any type with the opposite sex, even in important situations (like a naturalization ceremony) and they practice that belief in the absolute. Still an impenetrable right that shouldn’t be questioned? Suppose this form of self-segregation is racially-based instead of gender-based and still attributable to religion. Still not reasonable grounds to deny citizenship?
Refusing to eat pork discriminates against who exactly?
The French state (as represented by the immigration officer) said she could not be a French citizen unless she, against her beliefs, shook the officer’s hand. That is a completely cut and dried violation of her right to freely practice religion. It is the state saying people who hold this particular religious belief cannot be french citizens.
Refusing to eat pork or eating pork discriminates against no-one. The state forcing you to eat pork before you are allowed to be a citizen is clearly violating your freedom of religion. The fact that you are forcing Christians, Hindus and Atheists to eat pork, who probably don’t care about eat pork, as well as Jews and Muslims, who do, is irrelevant. No one would be in any doubt that when the state does that it is doing so as a means to ban Jews and Muslim from being citizens. The same goes for this case.
The actual etiquette in the Western world since men and women started interacting without chaperones has been that men of good manners did not extend their hands to women unless the woman did so first. I think the French official was hoping to either sexually humiliate the woman or use her refusal to deny her citizenship in the same country as her husband. He should be fired for his bigotry. In an ideal world he would be, and his male former co-workers would deliver a very severe beatdown for being so disrespectful to a woman.
I would like to repeat this because I think it’s pivotal. I know Roma woman from the former Yugoslavia who became naturalized French citizens in the late 1990s-2000s. None of them were forced to shake hands with an immigration official as a condition of receiving their citizenship and in almost all cases the immigration official knew ahead of time not to suggest physical contact out of courtesy.
It is EXACTLY as oppressive for the Saudi government to insist you need to be Muslim, and openly practice the tenets of the Islamic faith, before you can become a citizen as it is for France to insist cannot be a Muslim, or openly practice the tenets of the Islamic faith, and become a French citizen.
A constitutions that fails to protect its citizens from the latter oppression can’t be expect to them from the former one.
This is false. It is possible that it was the custom in social settings for some period of time, but it is incredibly rude in a business context for a man to fail to offer his hand to a woman. (And usually, there is one person who is the “host”, who is expected to initiate handshakes.) It is also rude to grab someone else’s hand, of course. The proper etiquette is to extend your hand to the “neutral” space between the people, and let the other person reach out and take your hand.
There are polite ways to decline an offered handshake. By far the most common is “I have a cold”, but “my religion doesn’t allow me to hold hands with the other sex” is also fine.
Yes, that is a critical piece of information. Most likely the official wanted an excuse to exclude a Muslim from citizenship.
I’ve been in the business world a good four decades and in every context polite men waited women to extend their hand first. The impolite ones who tried to intimidate women into touching them well, they just gave us advance warning of who we needed to be on guard about.
Also in academic settings where many cultures may be involved, the polite method is to verbally and politely, ask if shaking hands is the custom of all present rather than sticking your hand out in the air like a john looking for a hooker.
Please stop this. This isn’t what this thread is about. It’s been explained multiple times that your experiences are extremely out of the ordinary. And all you are doing is helping the people who think this woman was not unfairly treated.
I’d still like you to explain how, if touching is worse than rape, how all of a sudden it becomes ok simply because you are a homeless person begging for money?