Since 1905 France?s Roman Catholic Church has been subject to the discipline of French republican secularism, but now as those same constraints are increasingly applied to thrusting Islam, an ?Islamophobe? uproar is astir.
It was in 2004 after 15 years of pushing by the Left, that France outlawed religious manifestations of any kind ? Kippahs, large Catholic/Orthodox crosses, religious Bandanas, Sikh dastaars, hijabs, niqabs, khimars burqas ? in the public space.
Writing in Marianne, a leading left-wing weekly, Eric Conan says:
?supporters of secularism, forgetting the struggle in 1905 to impose the concept against a then powerful and even militant Catholic Church, are surprised and alarmed to find that their calls for secularism to be respected and reinvigorated in France are more and more labelled ?Islamophobic?. »