French Secularism and School Lunch

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/opinion/french-secularism-and-school-lunch.html

Version 0 of 1.

France is in the grips of yet another crisis involving the country’s particular version of secularism, known as laïcité. But this time, it’s a food fight. In March, Gilles Platret, the mayor of Chalon-sur-Saône, said the town’s public schools could no longer offer a pork-free option at lunch. The ban took effect after the town’s municipal council endorsed it last month.

Mr. Platret’s absurd argument is that offering an alternative for students who, for religious or other reasons, do not eat pork is “discrimination.” Mr. Platret says ensuring that all children are served the same lunch upholds France’s secular values.

This is worse than disingenuous. Forcing children to choose between eating pork and going hungry is a perversion of the principle of secularism. In fact, making an issue of what children eat for religious reasons is simply one more way to stigmatize and marginalize France’s minority Muslim communities, as well as its Jewish population.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who heads the Les Républicains party to which Mr. Platret belongs, has loudly endorsed the mayor’s ban, calling pork-free lunches a threat to “our tradition, our way of life.” The pork issue is, in fact, a bald attempt by Les Républicains to go after voters who have drifted to the far-right National Front party in the run-up to regional elections scheduled for early December and national elections in 2017.

France’s League for the Legal Defense of Muslims has objected and filed protests with a court in Dijon. The court should rule in favor of the league, though that would affect only Chalon-sur-Saône. Mayors in other towns in France have also taken alternative lunches off the menu.

One solution is a bill being drafted in France’s Parliament to make a nutritionally balanced, vegetarian lunch option mandatory in all French public schools. This makes sense. It would remove the stigma from those students who do not eat pork — for whatever reason — and would prevent mayors from politicizing the issue of what children eat.