The Right to Bear Symbolic Arms

Can you see the parallels between banning the kirpan and sending Jews to their death in the holocaust? Because one editorial board can.

The Globe and Mail editors praise Michael Ignatieff for being one of the few leaders to condemn the banning of the Sikh ceremonial dagger from the Quebec National Assembly last week. “How ironic that in the current era, politicians trip over one another to offer apologies for historical injustices, and fall silent over a current injustice,” they write. His stance on the issue is all the more impressive to the Globe because it probably won’t win him any votes. In ultra-secularist Quebec, it might be politically suicidal.

The Saskatoon StarPhoenix editors pull out the big rhetorical guns and compare banning the kirpan to Canada’s refusal to accept a boatload of Jewish refugees from Europe in 1939. “The argument government officials put forward … for that fateful decision is fundamentally the same as the one put forward by [those wishing to ban the kirpan] now,” says the StarPhoenix. “Security trumps accommodation.” While it’s true that security concerns are the most handily trotted out excuse to impose repressive policies, the StarPhoenix’s assessment of what happened in Quebec doesn’t hold water. “Singling out religious symbols … risks exposing minorities to the same sort of intolerance that existed … in the 1930s,” write the editors. But actually, singling out religious symbols is exactly what opponents of the kirpan ban want us to do: to identify and exempt religious symbols from security bans. In effect the StarPhoenix is calling for security policies to be dictated by ideology, something its editors purport to deplore.

The idea that daggers should be allowed in government buildings is “mulitculturalism gone wild,” writes the Globe's Lysiane Gagnon. “This is not a question of minority rights,” she argues, “otherwise, any practice deemed ‘religious’ or ‘cultural’ by a group should be accepted, including polygamy or female genital mutilation.” The litmus test for accommodation must be whether or not the religious practice is a tangible risk, which a dagger clearly could be. Her position is that accommodation is not, as some have argued, an existential threat to secular society, but merely that multiculturalism shouldn’t trump safety. We in The Newsroom are inclined to agree.