Katrin's second quote in the diary is from an article on the school veil ban controversy that also includes this:

France and the veil - the dark side of the law

Jean Baubérot, a historian and an expert in the sociology of religion, is the only member of the Commission Stasi who abstained from the vote recommending a ban. He remembers the isolated case that sparked the scarf controversy in 1989, when three girls were suspended for refusing to remove their scarves in class in Creil. "Then," he says, "the Conseil d'Etat issued a judgment ruling that proselytism didn't lie in someone's clothing but in someone's behaviour. I didn't agree with the shift It essentialises religion and prevents thinking. Based on the way a person dresses we peremptorily imagine the way she lives. To me, this seemed naïve and even obscurantist."

For Tevanian, the 2004 law marks a reactionary departure from the concept of laïcité, a conservative revolution. "People kept saying that we had to go back to laïcité, go back to the French politician Jules Ferry, which was a fallacious rhetoric," he says,"the fact that a new law had to be created showed that we weren't going back to anything, but revising something." According to him, laïcité, as it was applied in France since the separation of Church and State in 1905, "guarantees the neutrality of the agents of the State, but not of the users of a public service. Like in a football match - it's the pitch that needs to be neutral, not the players, who need to be free to elaborate their game." For Tevanian, shifting the obligation of neutrality to the users breaches the first article of the 1905 law, which guarantees freedom of conscience and freedom of worship. It also denies the right to education for all. "Proselytism," he adds, "that is to say, trying to convince the other, is, as long as you don't try to intimidate the person in front of you, fundamental in a democracy."

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}