Angry in the Great White North

Gilles Duceppe wants to make sure those strange religious symbols, like the habib and the turban, are not welcome in an independent Quebec:

Limits should be put on religious clothing and symbols in Quebec, but not if they're part of Quebec's heritage, Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe said this afternoon.

"We should have restrictions for reasons of hygiene - in operating rooms, for example," Duceppe told reporters after presenting a brief at the Bouchard-Taylor commission.

"Also for reasons of security - on construction sites" where hardhats must be worn, he added. "And also in functions that represent the neutrality of the state - the police, for example, or judges."

So what of Quebec "heritage"?

But Catholic symbols that are part of Quebec history and heritage - the cross on Mount Royal, for example, or roadside crosses - should be exempt from such restrictions, the Bloc leader added.

"We shouldn't turn ourselves into the Taliban and demolish all the buddhas of Quebec," he said. "We're not going to stop listening to Mozart's Requiem because it was written for a mass. All that is part of the heritage of humanity and of Quebec."

Is Gilles Duceppe being magnanimous to Quebec people of the Catholic faith? Hardly. Who in Quebec is religious? People in Quebec routinely poll at the bottom when it comes to religious faith and observance among Canadians.

In other words, if the Bloc Quebecois did recommend purging all signs of Catholic faith from sight (as they have tried to eliminate all signs of English), not all that many people in Quebec would complain.

So why let the signs of Quebec's Catholic history remain? I think it's obvious. Leave an empty space, and some immigrant might leave a statue of Buddha there. And he might complain if the government tried to take it away. So keep the crosses and churches and shrines to the saints in place. Gilles Duceppe couldn't care less about Quebec heritage. If he did, he woudn't be trying to eradicate English. Until such time as Quebec is independent and is able to pursue a radical program of social engineering to compel people to substitute a love of God with a love of French language and and a hatred of English, Quebec's empty shell of Catholicism, gutted by decades of statist government control of people's lives, will act as filler, clogging up the public spaces and keeping other forms of religious expression from taking hold where it might be seen.

Like styrofoam -- a substance that is virtually nothing and yet acts to fill space and keep other things out.