Atheism & Islamophobia: a Nihilistic Critique of France's Anti-Separatism Law.

the world can change the world can
change for you and me here and now in our generation but it's not going to change because we want it to the world's going to change when we start to make sacrifices when we start to make hard choices when we're willing to get uncomfortable if you think nothing can fundamentally change within one generation just look at the change for gay rights now i'm going to assume nobody in my audience is homophobic not consciously or intentionally so if you had a baby that you had to give away for adoption you had just two choices you could go to one adoption agency where you're 100 certain it'll be given to a gay or lesbian couple or go to another adoption agency will be raised by a pair of heterosexual parents which agency are you going to choose i know many people who are not homophobic who would not hesitate to say that they would prefer that their own child if they had to give their child up for adoption be raised by a pair of heterosexual parents rather than a gay couple or a lesbian couple i'm not one of them here in white english-speaking canada or in texas or in georgia or in new york city one of the strongest reasons to choose the gay adoption agency is that it's extremely unlikely that my child would be raised by fundamentalist christians or by anyone who is a member of any religion really taking it too terribly seriously i would like to think that any muslim christian or jew who is in a committed open gay marriage who goes to adopt is gonna be someone who is i if they're not atheist or highly secular in their outlook in the world they will at least have a very detached modern view of whatever religion it is that they're a member of i i would like to think so you're you're playing the statistics right playing the odds if you think the world can't change just think about how amazing it is that in 2021 this is even an option we're talking about when i was a child the debate was whether or not allowing gay couples to adopt children at all should be legal or illegal and that was a fiercely fought debate on both sides but inevitably and inexorably what people had to admit to themselves was that some heterosexual people are terrible parents and some gay people are terrible parents and the difference between being a good parent and a bad parent is not the difference between being straight and being gay this isn't a criterion that you can use to disqualify people from raising children what about religion though do you think there are some religious views that should disqualify you from being able to adopt a child do you think there aren't any do you think there aren't any beliefs at all that you disqualify someone from adopting and raising a child what if it's your child what if you quite literally have skin in the game what if it's your child being given up for adoption are you okay with a neo-nazi raising your child are you okay with a supporter of isis or the taliban there are no ideological limits there are no beliefs that we would use to distinguish whether people should or should not have certain political rights that would disqualify them from participating for example in adoption as equals my father had a whole bunch of kids with a whole bunch of different women and he made it sound really cool i should totally like try that sometime one of these women he got pregnant and i don't even know what he promised her but she kept the baby and then she figured out my father was a terrible person she decided to give this kid up for adoption i am considered ethnically jewish because my mother is jewish my father was not jewish in any way and this woman whom he got pregnant had a kid with she also was not jewish in any way and she made the decision to give this kid to a jewish only adoption agency an agency that guaranteed the baby would be given to and raised by jewish parents why would you do that why would anyone do that it's because she didn't want the baby to be raised by crazy christians christian fundamentalists and she knew living where she did in white english speaking canada there were a lot of christians who had big families the christians who already had four kids who went out and adopted a fifth because that's how they felt about showing love and lord and i would suppose she had a bit of a stereotype notion of jews as being more intellectually or culturally refined this is a stereotype that youtube is helping to break down we get to see the reality of who everybody is here on youtube and in the old days you know there were really just a few people on tv you know einstein sigmund freud kind of a cherry-picking selection of who got famous and who was celebrated so i have a half brother who is zero percent jewish ethnically whereas i'm 50 jewish uh and people perceive me as 100 jewish nobody calls me irish i don't know why but he was raised by a jewish architect who adopted him in toronto so they're hypothetical questions i'm asking but they're only half a step removed from reality i suppose that you dear viewer are not homophobic and you're not islamophobic if it were your baby if you had a newborn baby right now and you had to choose between giving that baby to a christian only adoption agency a jewish only adoption agency or a muslim-only adoption agency which one would you choose if you think we're all equal if you think it doesn't matter if you think that someone who believes in and practices the islamic faith is going to be just as good a parent to your child as an atheist as a secular family or even even compared to a fundamentalist christian if you think they're going to give your child just as bright a future oh oh right and you know what let's say it was a daughter let let's just say let's just say it wasn't your son it was your daughter you were giving up for adoption which which set of dice do you want to roll giving up to a muslim agency a jewish agency or a christian nation it's a terrible choice isn't it and you know the truth is i think if i were sitting and having this conversation with someone who was actually a member of the christian faith of the jewish faith or the muslim faith they would have to stop and reflect on what a terrible choice is themselves because even the most deluded true believing christians they're aware of who their fellow christians are even the most atheist secular members of the jewish faith they have some sense of what's going on in israel and what's going on you know at the shul down the block what's going on politically in terms of what these people actually believe in practice oh gee if i give my kid up for adoption you have some direct sense of who your co-religionists are okay things can change we can have a fundamentally secular atheist society but not just if you want it only if you're willing to get uncomfortable only if you're willing to make terrible sacrifices and the change is going to involve coercion i had a teacher and it's a little bit significant for this story that this was a male teacher married to a female teacher and they both taught in the same school at that age i was not the self-confident well-spoken person that i am today i would have been 11 when this happened and i was still figuring out what the political status of homosexuals in our society was and such a different political context in those days you know insults against homosexual people for being homosexual were heard on the schoolyard every day constantly it was frankly the definition of being weak or stupid or clumsy to be called gay right it was heard constantly but i was aware there was this struggle for gay rights and gay equality going on and the other hand there was also a huge discourse at that time that's now forgotten about trying to medicalize homosexuality and i knew many children who believed in this out of ignorance people who tried to present homosexuality as if it had crept into our society because the drinking water was poisoned there was too much air pollution this was some kind of recent thing in our society and that could be cured right so there were a lot of um powerful messages and sources of misinformation around me and i was taken into class with this this male teacher just once and it was because he was he was popular with the other teachers and his female teacher was married to and we got a special sex ed class with that male teacher he wasn't he wasn't my teacher i saw him rarely in the school and i guess it was just because he likes to give that class and other teachers didn't want to do the job and the other teachers i can't say all the teachers in the school but some four or five teachers in the room who all thought this was kind of upbeat and fun and funny and this guy gave the most horrifyingly homophobic lecture to us imaginable constantly conflating homophobic pardon me constantly complaining homosexuality with pedophilia like claiming that he claimed openly that you shouldn't allow homosexuals to be schoolteachers because if you do they will molest the kids like it's very easy to say that today any school teacher gave that lecture especially if it were recorded on someone's cell phone would be fired or would be asked to resign okay and i can't say that students were cool with it i mean we were children i think the students didn't know how to respond the other teachers were cool thing they were kind of like laughing and encouraging them to go along they'd all heard it before they'd heard him give this lecture once or twice a year every year for who knows how many years this was his perspective on human sexuality and i mean he covered all this stuff from such a crass vulgar perspective he talked about getting late in college you know and it stays with me i'm cursed with a really accurate memory i could i could repeat you know more or less verbatim stuff this guy it was it was a really disturbing experience for me but it was disturbing because of the fundamental political and ethical question right of the status of homosexuals and gay rights in our society and i mean it was disturbing because it was an authority figure in a school teaching this as curriculum it wasn't just someone's crazy gay uncle you know at a garden party right now firing that teacher you know using coercion hey being the thought police requiring requiring that your teachers believe in and support and propound the government's own doctrine on gay rights it's made a lot of people uncomfortable i mean who knows there are no statistics for this how many god-fearing traditional christians male and female became school teachers in canada in the united states how many of them grew up as good bible bashing you know day care center volunteering i love kids kind of people people who love kids and love jesus and think they're making the world a better place and went into that job 100 expecting to do the lord's work and then found out that in the eyes of the department of education in the eyes of the government in the eyes of the general public they were a thought criminal for teaching things that to them you know they learned from their own parents and grandparents things they would say around their own dinner table that that wasn't just not permissible in their professional you know metier as a as a school teacher but that was punishable you know you could be fired and indeed you could become cancelled you know you could become pariah socially as a result i knew a family of nazis i didn't know them real well did i mention that i'm jewish the father had been a schoolteacher until one day and i heard this story from many people because there were many witnesses until one day he gave a lecture to the class that today we would describe as alt-right or race realism what this teacher told the students in the class was that it was okay for them to be friends with members of other races for the black kids to be friends with kids as long as they knew as long as they were prepared for the eventuality that there was a race war coming and in the near future our parents were going to be killing each other and we were going to be at war with each other you know we're going to be killing each other in the streets i realize this is hard to believe and even as a child when i heard this story from multiple sources i found it hard to believe i saw that guy i never really spoke to him i knew his kids i walked past his house frequently he had a team of those stereotypically nazi attack dogs i think doberman pinchers right everything about this guy everything about his attack dogs everything about his wife everything about his kids absolutely clicked with this story i don't want to name his kids obviously on some level i don't know if the story is true he gave his sons names that only a neo-nazi would give their kids like either you are a neo-nazi if you give your kids these particular names or you're one of those people who's into the revival of the pre-christian germanic gods uh almost all those people are neo-nazis you know like you'd have to be everything checked out with this story and i heard it back from multiple witnesses this guy had been a schoolteacher and what i was told was that after he was i he was either fired or asked to resign and resigned because he was told he would be fired um i was told that after he stopped being a schoolteacher he had to drive a taxi cab for a living i don't know if he did that forever or what he did immediately thereafter okay i remember the guy i remember the story i remember meeting his sons they were they were students in my school and i remember so many times walking past that fence with that team of attack dogs you know um do you think anyone can be a schoolteacher regardless of what they believe all right do you think neo-nazis can be school teachers do you think they have freedom of conscience freedom of belief right do you think there is nothing in the muslim faith that is as incompatible with modern secular western democracy as the tenets of neo-nazism the transition we're talking about here to a truly secular democracy to an atheist society okay it's going to mean real sacrifices it's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable now what the french have done is set down a very strange series of precedents for us the first big controversy had to do with banning the head scarf really banning women concealing their faces for religious reasons right and many many years after this happened in france the same drama played out in quebec the former french colony now a province of canada in quebec they phrased the law a little bit differently so it was banning all overt or ostentatious symbols of the religious faith you're a member of but that included headscarves for muslim women and face coverings what have you and so it was established in quebec that if you were a public sector employee of any kind a school teacher or a nurse wearing this kind of costume would be bad how long is it going to take for us to admit to ourselves that what we're banning is not the hat it's what goes on inside people's heads right what we're banning is not the costume it's the belief be tokened by the costume right like is it really the nazi flag we're offended by is it really someone having nazi tattoos that's a problem no it's the belief it's the commitment it's the ideology right on a fairly deep level it's morally and ethically who they are now i do not think that islam should be singled out for persecution in france and i don't think it should be singled out in china and i don't think it should be singled out in canada or the united states the more we admit what the problems with islam are the more we have to confront those problems within christianity within judaism even within other religions that are marginal to our part of the world like buddhism which i happen to have some expertise in right like inasmuch as these same problems appear also within buddhism or hinduism right we're also going to have to use coercion to eliminate them france passed a law i'm sorry i don't think it's passed i think they've just proposed the law as of today as of this date on the calendar they have proposed and they are debating a law that is innocuously said to be opposed to muslim separatism right and from my perspective that is precisely what makes it an unfair and immoral law all right because the problem isn't separatism the problem is islam and inasmuch as the problem isn't in islam we have to recognize the same problems when they occur within christianity we have separate communities of christians don't we right do you see what it's getting at this idea of separatism we have communities of christians that live as live as communes cut off from the outside world right and they don't send their kids to normal secular schools they don't wear normal secular clothes right you know what i'm talking about whether you think of the amish or the mennonites or what have you uh we have a whole bunch of them in in saskatchewan and manitoba in the middle middle prairies the parts of canada where land is cheap enough and they raise their kids in ignorance to work on the farm and so on they're a separate society within canada is that the problem why is that only a problem when it's islam right why is that not a problem for christians we had a case here in canada against orthodox jews i forget if it went to the supreme court or just a medium level court frankly but it went up several levels of the court we had a case about whether or not it was legal for orthodox jews to operate a separate bus company a bus company that only sold tickets to and it's only four orthodox jews and you know what the crazy part is wasn't a human rights case this wasn't about like equality like hey i if i'm not jewish i should be able to buy a ticket to get on that bus too it wasn't about no no no it wasn't like black people complaining they were discriminated against but no the case was brought by another bus company saying it was unfair competition okay they're making less money because of this all right there's no doubt that the threat posed by islamic terrorism you know the threat posed by the cultural contrast between islam and you know the western mainstream there's no doubt that that's drawn our attention to what the fundamental you know issues are in the 21st century okay but you know let's treat as shallow what is shallow and let's treat as profound what is truly profound okay you can ask someone to change their headdress you can ask someone to change their scarf you can ask christians literally come back to this case now not to wear their christian crosses on the outside of their clothes but to put them under their shirt okay you can ask members of other religions to take off their turban i don't even know if a turban counts as a religious symbol what if what if you're just rocking a turban because you think it's fashionable i mean you know all these things ultimately it's never going to be about addressing the costume it's going to be about addressing competence confidence to do what competence to take on fully the duties of being a citizen in a democracy okay who is competent to be a school teacher who is competent to be a police officer all right who is competent to debate the laws and make the laws who is competent you know to shape the minds and expectations of the next generation i don't think it's a shallow or trivial thing that teachers were fired for homophobia that this new standard emerged in our society of what was acceptable and what was not and that educational institutions took on the burden of saying hey we have a homophobic society we have a homophobic culture we live in a country we're on the school yard every day kids little kids call other little kids gay and worst names you know insults specifically linked to homosexuality they're hearing the whole time and it's not enough for us to just silently passively preserve our own moral superiority we have to get out there and actively counter that we have to actively overturn centuries of normalization of homophobia and train children to live in a new world a world that doesn't even exist yet where homosexuals and heterosexuals really are equal right we have to with at least that much coercion quite possibly much much more overturned centuries and millennia of religious thinking of tradition and prepare our children not to live in the world as it is but in the world as it should be