Sign of the times

Saturday afternoon, Françoise Tenenbaum, Socialist adjunct delegate for Solidarity and Health to the mayor of Dijon, bestowed medals honoring the French family. The Medal of the French Family, created in 1920 by decree, modified on October 28, 1982, is an honorary distinction to worthy persons who are raising or who have raised many children, in order to pay homage to their merits and to show the gratitude of the Nation.

It is therefore a way to reward these meritorious mothers who, through their devotion and their self-sacrifice, took on the responsibilities of their role, even if these mothers themselves do not see in it any merit. (...)

Thus, 21 mothers, in the presence of their families received their medal. Eight silver medals (six or seven children): Fatiha Benhalima, Fouzia Amezane, Fatima Boularess, Aïcha Hadj-Abderrahmane, Mama Lefdou, Fatima Loubbi, Rosaria Rutigliano, Aïcha Tasry.

Thirteen bronze medals (four or five children): Saadia Ayar née Ayar, Saadia Ayar née Jabir, Medhia Bargaoui, Fatima Batta, Diane Brenot, Saâdia Brouzi, Fatima Et-Tellah, Nacéra Farsi, Fatima Haddache, Nathalie Lerbet, Zineb Oussghir, Stella-Cora Robert, Latifa Sabik.

Thanks to http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/

French catch "English disease"

It seems the French may have fallen victim to the “English disease.” No not that disease, not the one the Brits call the “French disease.”

I am writing about bad engineering design. In this case it is the TGV, the fast French train that plies its trade between the U.K. and France through the tunnel.

Just before Christmas the tunnel service was suspended when six trains failed and had to be towed back to France. It happened again yesterday. It seems that the cold weather has caused moisture build-up in the engine compartment and has shorted out the electrics.

This is bad design, because whoever put this together ought to have anticipated the impact of a hot engine on an influx of cold air and should have isolated the electrical components.

In the 1960s, my father, for reasons best known to him, became enthralled with English cars. Some folks today may not realize that the U.K. back then had a large auto industry that exported its products to the world. In fact, it was the largest car exporting nation at that time.

I think my dad took a liking to a nearby garage owner who also happened to have the local dealership for Austin and Vauxhall. Over a period of about 5 years our driveway had two of the larger Austin’s (which were not large at all by North American standards) and one Vauxhall. They were all purchased new.

Collectively, they spent almost as much time in the garage being repaired as they were being driven. They were terrible cars, completely unreliable. You could never count on going out in one of them and returning in the same vehicle.

We used to chalk it up to the fact that British automotive engineers had no idea about winter driving conditions in Canada when they designed them.

That theory ended in one spring when I took an Austin for a spin on a rain-soaked day. There was a nearby town that was located at the bottom of a river valley, with steep grades at either end of the highway that ran through the middle of the town.

I came down one hill, drove to the other side, and started to climb the hill out of town. Halfway up, the motor began to sputter and lose power.

I managed a U-turn and on the down slope the engine came up to full power. When I started up the other hill, the same thing happened, and I again pulled U-turn and used gravity to get the car up to speed. This time I roared through the town, greatly exceeding the speed limit, and tried to assault the hill. No luck, the motor died halfway up. I abandoned the effort and found alternative transportation.

Later we consulted with the dealer who said the problem was that the sparkplugs were all positioned in the front of the motor, just behind the radiator, and the rainwater had shorted them out. When we asked for a solution to the problem, he said the manufacturer provided a pull down blind that could be installed just behind the radiator. However, he cautioned, if you do that, your engine will overheat.

If the automotive engineers in one of the wettest countries in the Northern Hemisphere couldn’t design a car appropriate for their own climate, then it was time to go back to American cars.

And that is just what we did.

Governments, when they are not doing it for you, they are doing it to you

Having worked in government, I must say I am not a big fan. To me, governments at all levels leave a lot to be desired. They are necessary evils and should be treated as such. They should be compelled to do only what is absolutely essential for good government and not a thing more.

In the City of Toronto, the councillors met late at night for a semi-secret vote (the media had all departed the council chamber) to grant funds to one of their own who had libeled a rival candidate during the election and had been successfully sued by that candidate. The amount was some $65,000 with an added amount of nearly $30,000 to compensate for the taxes on the base settlement. The city’s own solicitor told the council this was illegal. Now a citizens’ group has formed to take all of the councilors who voted for this to court.

This year is an election year. Let us hope the normally butt-headed voters in that city decide it is time for some new blood at the council table and get rid of these “well past their due date” troughers.

In France, the French government is introducing a law that would criminalize domestic arguments between spouses or quasi-spouses, known as the “yelling at your wife” law. It was a former Prime Minister of Canada, who had sponsored new liberal sex laws and divorce legislation, in his former role as the Minister of Justice, who coined the phrase, “The State has no business in the bedrooms of the Nation.”

The proposed French law expands the role of the state to the living room, dining room, kitchen, bathrooms and hallways of a person’s home, and probably the driveway and garden, for that matter.

That brings us to Canada, where the current Conservative government is taking some heat from the columnists and readers of the Toronto Star for proroguing Parliament until the beginning of March. It was due to commence its session on January 25.

I say good on P.M. Stephen Harper. There will be no opportunity for more stupid legislation in the intervening months, and, when it does come back to order, all the bills will have to be re-introduced. In fact, I will bet there will be an election late this year and so those bills will also likely die on the order paper.

Imagine, a whole year in which the government can do absolutely nothing. Could anything be sweeter?

I think it was Belgium that went for an entire year with no legally elected government and nobody missed it.

Carla Bruni, she is more than just a pretty face

Kudos to Carla Bruni, former model and current wife of the President of France. She told off the Pope for the harm his church causes in Africa by its ludicrous stand on birth control. Recently Benedict poo-poohed the use of condoms, claiming that they just worsen the AIDS epidemic.

Bruni has brought down some Catholic condemnation for her remarks which are said to be inappropriate for France's First Lady. Let us hope she sticks to her guns.

You go girl!

Yes Virginia, there is a virginity

I like France and the French. I like the culture, the language and the history. But here they are dead wrong (see AP story below). I would prefer if all religions would go the route of the Greek, Roman, Norse, and Babylonian gods -- into the mists of oblivion. However, they should vanish on their own because they are no longer relevant to the advance of society and are recognized as such by the populace, not because they are legislated out of existence. A woman is free to enter a contract for marriage and promise her husband she will be a virgin on the wedding day, no matter whether it is a cultural norm or is religously-inspired. That is what freedom means and that is what women's emancipation means.

PARIS (AP) - The bride said she was a virgin. When her new husband discovered that was a lie, he went to court to annul the marriage—and a French judge agreed.
The ruling ending the Muslim couple's union has stunned France and raised concerns the country's much-cherished secular values are losing ground to religious traditions from its fast-growing immigrant communities.

The decision also exposed the silent shame borne by some Muslim women who transgress long-held religious dictates demanding proof of virginity on the wedding night.

In its ruling, the court concluded the woman had misrepresented herself as a virgin and that, in this particular marriage, virginity was a prerequisite.

But in treating the case as a breach of contract, the ruling was decried by critics who said it undermined decades of progress in women's rights. Marriage, they said, was reduced to the status of a commercial transaction in which women could be discarded by husbands claiming to have discovered hidden defects in them.

The court decision "is a real fatwa against the emancipation and liberty of women. We are returning to the past," said Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, the daughter of immigrants from Muslim North Africa, using the Arabic term for a religious decree.

The outcry has been unrelenting since word of the April 1 decision in the closed-door trial in Lille was made public last week by the daily newspaper Liberation. In its judgment, the tribunal said the 2006 marriage had been ended based on "an error in the essential qualities" of the bride, "who had presented herself as single and chaste."

Justice Minister Rachida Dati, whose parents also were born in North Africa, initially shrugged off the ruling—but the public clamor reached such a pitch that she asked the prosecutor's office this week to lodge an appeal.

What began as a private matter "concerns all the citizens of our country and notably women," a statement from her ministry said.

The appeal was filed Tuesday and three judges could hear the case sometime this month, said Eric Vaillant of the appeals court in Douai, near Lille.

The hitch is that both the young woman and the man at the center of the drama are opposed to an appeal, according to their lawyers. The names of the woman, a student in her 20s, and the man, an engineer in his 30s, have not been disclosed.

The young woman's lawyer, Charles-Edouard Mauger, said she was distraught by the dragging out of the humiliating case. In an interview on Europe 1 radio, he quoted her as saying: "I don't know who's trying to think in my place. I didn't ask for anything. ... I wasn't the one who asked for the media attention, for people to talk about it, and for this to last so long."

The issue is particularly distressing for France because the government has fought to maintain strong secular traditions as demographics change. An estimated 5 million Muslims live in the country of 64 million, the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.

France passed a law in 2004 banning Muslim headscarves and other ostentatious religious signs from classrooms, a move that caused an uproar in the Muslim world.

Now, critics contend another law on the books is being used to effectively condone the custom requiring a woman to enter marriage as a virgin, and prove it with bloodstained sheets on her wedding night.

Article 180 of the Civil Code states that when a couple enters into a marriage, if the "essential qualities" of a spouse are misrepresented, then "the other spouse can seek the nullity of the marriage." Past examples of marriages that were annulled include a husband found to be impotent and a wife who was a prostitute, according to attorney Xavier Labbee.

Ironically, Article 180 also guards against forced marriages.

Labbee, the lawyer for the bridegroom in question, says it was not the young woman's virginity that was at issue.

"The question is not one of virginity. The question is one of lying," he told The Associated Press.

"In the ruling, there is no word 'Muslim,' there is no word 'religion,' there is no word 'custom.' And if one speaks of virginity it is with the term 'a lie."

Labbee said both the man and the woman "understand that annulling the marriage is preferable to divorce because it wipes the slate clean (of) what you want to forget, but divorce wipes away nothing."

Indeed, the court ruling states that the woman "acquiesced" to the demand for an annulment "based on a lie concerning her virginity."

"One can deduce that this quality (virginity) was seen by her as an essential quality that was decisive" in the man's decision to marry, the ruling said.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon said an appeal must be lodged "so this ruling does not set a judicial precedent."

In a rare show of agreement, politicians on the left and right said the court's action does not reflect French values.

"In a democratic and secular country, we cannot consider virginity as an essential quality of marriage," said an expert on French secularism, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux.

The decision underscored the painful predicament faced today by many Muslim women in France and elsewhere in the West who become sexually emancipated but remain bound by strict codes of honor inherited and enforced by their families—and prospective husbands.

It is not unusual for young Muslim women to procure fake virginity certificates, use tricks like vials of spilled blood on the wedding night or even undergo hymen repair to satisfy family expectations, and evade the shame that would follow if their secret got out.

An informal survey by The Associated Press in 2006 found numerous private clinics in the Paris region where such surgery is performed, as well as doctors who supply fake virginity certificates before a marriage.

"Today, the judicial system of a modern country cannot hold to these savage traditions, completely inhuman for the young woman," said the rector of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur.

He likened the court decision to "equating marriage with a commercial transaction."

Like some others, Boubakeur, a moderate, voiced fears that Muslim fundamentalists would seek to profit from the Lille ruling "as they have done with the veil. ... Fundamentalists use (head scarves) like their flag."

"We ask Muslims to live in their era," he said.