PS, There were a bunch of Muslims in the audience including women with hijabs including Palestinians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Lebanese, etc who were getting in on the fun but mostly plain old white, non-Muslim people like me who laughed it up and thought he was great.
The province of Quebec recently passed a law that forbids the wearing of religious symbols by anyone employed by the province. The criteria is quite wide in that it applies to teachers who are actually employed by school boards that are sanctioned by the provincial education department so the legislation does not strictly apply to only civil servant employees, i.e., those that work directly in government administration. I believe, for example, that is also applies to city bus drivers, for example, but I'm not 100% about that. One things it means is that Sikhs cannot work in some occupations, such as the police for example. That last one is odd because Sikhs are allowed in the federal RCMP force. Many have distinguished themselves in the military as well, but in Quebec, they need not apply for some jobs.
They worded it in a very general way but it is obviously directed at the wearing of head gear by muslim women. This is interesting in many ways.
The first and obvious one is the very notion that the government has the right to tell people how to dress. Personally speaking, in this vein I think they should outlaw hoodies on teenagers because it interferes with me picking them out of police line-ups.
The second is the timing. I wonder if they would have introduced this kind of regulation when Roman Catholic nuns still wore their old-style habits, as many of them were employed as teachers in Quebec parochial schools. This method of dress, moderation-plus, I'll call it, was pretty common among Victorian women as well. Presumably Amish women could not get jobs in the Quebec civil service, but they wisely opt out of modern society anyway.
A third way is the argument, made by my Moroccan muslim neighbour and others, is that the wearing of head gear is not a religious requirement or symbol anyway. It is only practitioners in some cultures that cover their heads, many muslim traditions do not require their women to cover their heads. So it's more and Arab or Pakistani thing than a muslim thing. This point of view may be controversial in the muslim community, for all I know.
It will be interesting to see if there will be a court challenge of the law. It has the usual supporters, which include the usual suspects who feel the need to force foreigners behave in certain ways, for some reason. My parents, post-war Italian immigrants were dis-approved of in similar ways. During the partly xenophobic rise of the francophone separatist culture in Quebec, my father used to say, "The Fascists did that." If that's not too Godwin-line for you.
Anyway, as I stated earlier, it should be possible to discuss immigration in a rational cogent way, but at the moment it isn't. Your President didn't set the tone very helpfully when he called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists. The drug dealing charge was especially bizarre, as if the reason there are illegal drugs in the US is because those nasty foreigners bring them in, as if it's a supply problem. The reason that dealers import drugs into the US is because Americans are willing to pay such high prices for them. Insofar as it is a problem in the first place, it's an American problem not a foreigner problem. But we've probably had that discussion before.
