Word: publical
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...thus seems, at first glance, to be a logical— and legal—extension of the commitments outlined in a 2004 law on “laïcité” that outlawed all “ostensible” religious symbols from public schools. In other words, six years ago it was the headscarf, now it is the burka. Then it was public schools, now it is public space...
Framed as a matter of church/state separation, or “laïcité,” the 2004 law’s sphere of application was heavily circumscribed: It was limited to public schools and it applied to subjects (presumptively victimized young girls) who were legally minor. While the subject of significant debate, both at the time and since, the 2004 law was nonetheless upheld as conforming to the principles of the French Constitution and to the European Convention on Human Rights, in part because it was framed in universal terms. The same cannot be said...
...remedy what they view as a lacuna in existing French republican law. There is here a notable paradox: These politicians want to breach existing statutes (on the preservation of “human dignity,” “gender equality,” and even of public order) so as to better uphold them. In doing so, they hope to demonstrate the extent (and integrity) of their “republican” commitments by specifically targeting a very small group of devout women. But this law, far from being universalist, has a particularized and particularizing intent...
...political instrumentalization of the “integral veil” indeed reveals the growth of a disturbing public presence: a strident French nationalism which upholds woman’s bodily dignity as a core value and ideal, but only at the expense of actual women’s volition, agency, and legal rights. That is the real iceberg that looms beneath this...
...elected to the Senate in January, President Obama noted, “Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.” The public is unhappy with the status quo and is looking to new people and new modes of political organization that can embody and effect democratic change. Clearly the traditional models—oriented around the state or the market—have been incomplete. Participatory democracy offers us a solution that goes...