A very confused Canadian person tells us that she – quite rightly – opposes the grotesquerie of swaddling very little girls in the hijab. But this is only a kind of whispered aside; she is actually indignant throughout the piece that Quebec’s secular government has issued a complaint about an image, in a children’s book, of a very little girl swaddled in a hijab. She sees this complaint as bullying.
No, babe. Bullying is parents forcing body draping on a helpless child.
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She says there’s no knowing how many in Quebec approve of this form of secularism. Oh but there is: Oodles of opinion polls show strong support for banning hijabs in the public realm. That’s what the current national controversy over Bill 21 is about.
Reasonable people can debate whether adults in public sector jobs should drape their heads and bodies; only religious bullies would consider the blanketing of female babies and toddlers defensible.
I mean, even the opinion writer feels the need to disclose that she in fact opposes the thing she’s defending. I wonder why she opposes it. Her argument would have made more sense if she’d spilled a bit of ink on the matter.