(Another) study debunks the immigration-focused view of accommodations
While my friends at SdeB Institute were busy applying their po-mo theories to a situation they seem to know little about, some people were actually checking the facts.
Statscan just published another study that shows that reasonable accommodations have nothing to do with immigration. The trouble, if any, comes from a very small number of religious fundamentalists that are rarely immigrants. The thing just got blown out of proportions by the medias, and SdeB Inst, while condemning exactly that, are going after the same red herrings.
I was into x before x was in style!
Before there was the Bouchard-Taylor circus and before the “reasonable accommodation” meme got its popularity, I attended a conference given by Quebec’s human rights commission. They showed us nice graphics with pretty much the same numbers you can read in the study that was published yesterday (see above).
I remember seeing how my colleges felt relieved. There was that huge feeling that everything was fine and that so-called “accommodations” pretty much concerned only a handful of Jehovah Witnesses. We also heard… some guy (?) doing a lecture about the French model of secularism and how we were wise to stay away from it (true: France was a colonialist country; we were a colony and later, as French Canadians, colonized.)* That was pretty much settled for me.
But then there started to be really ill-informed editorial pieces about immigration, how religion is the foundation of society, culture this, culture that and so forth. I even saw a store using the term “Reasonable accommodations” to advertise it’s junk. Accommodations were better before they sold out.
Then, more recently, there has been some name calling, including ”integrist“, and other not-so-friendly terms. This new meme (secularism=fascism) is getting huge and provides a new red herring for whoever wants to push his religious or relativistic agenda.
The solution, as always: going back to the basics of the problem, defining the terms properly, and avoiding easy conjectures.
* And I’m not the only one to think that, if you read the mémoire written by Présence Musulmane you’ll see that they also point this out. (PDF, it’s on page 4) This paper, by the way, has the actual feel and academic level of a memoir, unlike many other papers that were brought up before the B&T commission. (Don’t worry, I’ll tackle Présence Musulmane some other time.)
Tags: commission Bouchard-Taylor, fundies, in english, Simone de Beauvoir Institute
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