Giles Beauchamp: No religious symbols for school teachers: Quebec’s laicity law & hermeneutical marg скачать в хорошем качестве

Giles Beauchamp: No religious symbols for school teachers: Quebec’s laicity law & hermeneutical marg

No religious symbols for school teachers: Quebec’s laicity law and hermeneutical marginalisation. Visible religious symbols (other than Catholics) have worried citizens of the Canadian province of Quebec for a long time. The worry had reached a high point in 2007 with what was called the “accommodation crisis,” in response to which the government created the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences. The report1 has played an important role over the next decade in discussions on laicity in Quebec. On June 16, 2019, claiming that we spoke of laicity long enough, the government of François Legault adopted An Act respecting the laicity of the State2 which prohibits state employees in a position of authority (including teachers and school directors) from wearing visible religious symbols in the exercise of their function. The justification for the ban relies on the alleged fact that religious symbols worn by state employees undermine the appearance of neutrality of public institutions. Even though the ban applies to every religious symbol, particular attention is given in public discourse on the hijab which is often perceived by the public as a symbol of inequality. The ban is thought to be acceptable, i.e. it is judged to be not excessively discriminatory, when one minimizes the importance of the wearing of the symbol for one’s identity (understood in terms of conviction of conscience or otherwise) and supposes that it is possible to simply take off a religious symbol while one is at work. This interdiction can cause numerous injustices, but in this paper, I focus on injustices that affect an agent in her capacity as a knower, i.e. epistemic injustices, and their causes. More precisely, I focus on the hermeneutical marginalization and injustice that are at play in the current situation in Quebec. Following Miranda Fricker, I understand hermeneutical injustice as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization" I argue that when the government assumes that religious employees could simply take off their religious symbols at work, the government relies on and further strengthens hermeneutical marginalization about the meaning of religious symbols and their importance for those who wear them, which in turn can cause hermeneutical injustices when one tries to express the meaning of one’s religious symbol and the reasons why one wears it. This hermeneutical marginalization undermines the agency of persons wearing visible religious signs, and especially of Muslim women because the reasons that are given for wearing religious symbols and why one cannot simply take it off at work cannot be seen as legitimate ones nor the result of agency. On numerous occasions in the media, Muslim women have refused to give reasons for wearing the hijab knowing that they would not be understood as a genuine expression of agency. In order to correct the hermeneutical marginalization, I argue that we should aim to have members of under-represented groups in important positions in society that shape shared knowledge to help bridge hermeneutical gaps. In other words, we need to have religious people wearing visible religious symbols in a position of power to help shape the collective hermeneutical resources in an unprejudiced way. Unfortunately, Quebec’s laicity law is doing exactly the opposite.