Artist's Statement (on "France Secularism")

by Sarah Lesniak

CNN website journalists have reported several updates about a social issue occurring in France for the past few months. The short of the debate is whether French public schools want to allow headscarves (Hijabs), turbans, large crucifixes, and other religious symbols into public schools. If the senate should pass this proposition, a ban will be enforced for all religious accessories to be untolerated by school officials and confiscated from students if caught wearing them. It seemed to me an excessive measure of separating church and state on such matters when such a ban could also be defined as religious intolerance. The debate opened the subject into a gray area of whether the religious symbols offended nonreligious/or alternatively religious citizens or if the ban would infringe on the rights of citizens to practice their religions. I took the issue one step further in my poem by questioning what motives or complaints could have possibly started up a debate after so many years of tolerating the presence of these religious symbols in public schools. Did the religious complaints come from a teacher or faculty observing the problems that these religious symbols stirred between students or did a parent wonder where a child bringing home so many ideas about religion get them from? Then I weighed the benefits and harms of the different outcomes that could occur from the decision results. I decided that it would be better to allow the presence of headscarves and other religious symbols in public schools because of the increasing importance of cultural awareness in our society and the need for tolerance between cultures in this internationally dependent world. The fact that people of another culture or religion such as Islam were being educated in the same class as those living in more traditional French ways shows just how important and prevalent conversing and understanding other cultures can be in this modern age.

See Sarah's Work

France Secularism: A Visual/Argumentative Poem:

Click here for larger image