The Quebec government says it will ban religious symbols in the province’s daycare centres.
Secularism Minister Jean-François Roberge says there is a “broad consensus” that Quebecers want secularism to be strengthened.
The announcement follows a recommendation made this summer by a committee tasked with advising the province on how to enhance secularism. The committee had called for the ban to be extended to daycares.
Quebec has already banned public sector workers in positions of authority, such as teachers and judges, from wearing religious symbols on the job.
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I’ve read their message a few times, and your response, and I think I see the mismatch. They said “I don’t know how they could do this, but what they could do is ban prayer mats”.
And I think you interpreted this as “I don’t know how they’d enforce this. Oh, but here’s an idea, we should get rid of prayer mats”
But the way I read it I think they meant “I don’t know what this means for Christians and Jews, but I hope they don’t use this simply to ban prayer mats and nothing else”
Good on you for attempting to parse different meanings out of what was said. Too few people attempt to do so and instead jump all over a misinterpretation.
Yeah, that’s it. I’m worried that this is just thinly veiled Islamophobia, because praying can occur in someone’s head with no outward indication that a person’s praying, so you obviously can’t ban prayer itself. You can ban public displays of prayer like a prayer mat, which means that Muslims must be on private property where prayer is allowed (good luck screening for that in the job search) at five spaced out and preordained times a day. I hope there’s another way to interpret a ban on prayer.