http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49865

"Western teenagers wearing whatever headgear is fashionable in their peergroup most likely will."

This is known as the "two wrongs make a right" principle.

I expect the stupid hat rule came in because anarchists were inclined to hide guns under them. A modest scanner at the entrance would solve the problem.

And in our country William Hague wore a baseball cap, and look what happened to him.

Bob Doney

Why? Because she omitted relevant information (the cause of the vote) and she blew the whole thing completely out of proportion. Colen's column can be summarized in her own words as: "A predominantly anti-religious parliament allowed the symbol of Muslim dominance in the West to entrench itself on the public benches of its core democratic institution". When I first read it, I thought by myself: "Damn this parliament, when are they ever going to learn?".

When I think about it now, I agree with the alteration of the rule.
First of all, when people remove their hats and caps as a sign of respect, for instance when they enter a church, this doesn't imply the headgear of nuns. The same goes for the hijab. Keeping it on is no sign of disrespect. By forcing nuns and Muslim women to remove their headgear, the rule overshoots itself.

Secondly, respect should be deserved and not imposed by state coercion. If the visitors respect "the House and the democratic principles it embodies" they will remove their hats and caps out of their own free will and not because a bully at the entrance orders them to do so. The fact that there is a rule which forces people to remove their hats suggests that the Belgian state never expected its citizens to have any respect for it.

Conclusion: a column about the vote could have had a title like "Belgian parliament abolishes hypocritical rule". Unfortunately, Alexandra has another agenda. She blows the whole thing out of proportion in order to sing her old deceiving song: everything goes wrong and only secularism is to blame.

Alexandra Coolen asks why "a predominantly anti-religious parliament" allowed "the symbol of Muslim dominance in the West to entrench itself on the public benches of its core democratic institution".

The answer is plain and simple: because a Christian senator and a Christian organization complained about it and asked the parliament to change the rule.

In December last year Pax Christi's staff visited the parliament. Two Muslim women, both staff members, were denied access to the visitors' gallery because of their headgear. Sabine de Bethune, a senator of the Christian Democrat party, called this "outrageous" and filed a complaint because "no Catholic nun, no patient with a cap, no Jew with a yarmulka and no pope is welcome in the visitors' gallery". Pax Christi did the same.

Coolen's article shows how she tries to deceive her readers by blaming secularism for everything that goes wrong. She doesn't mention the real cause of the vote because she doesn't want to criticize "the last vestiges of Christianity".

While secular women like Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are risking their lives to fight Islam, Catholic bishops march in pro-immigration demonstrations, pope Benedict condemns the Danish cartoons, Pax Christi fights for Muslim rights and Alexandra Coolen preaches her defeatism and blames everything on secularism.

This doesn't sound right to me:

If this were really happening, then the former Catholics would be converting to Islam, but they are not. And surely any religious vacuum, if such exists, will exist within an individual not a country or nation?

It may well be true that Belgians (and Britons and Spaniards and Dutch and ...) are losing any sense of group identity as they lose interest in religion. But, 1) this is happening spontaneously and won't be reversed by saying, "keep your religion", and 2) there seems to be no reason that Belgians etc. can't maintain a group identity without recourse to religion.

And then after all of that, what difference does it make if gay people exist and form loving relationships and acclaim them by getting married?

One can say that marriage is more than acclaiming a loving relationship, but how is that so? People make families on the basis of the loving relationship they have acclaimed and that is wonderful and beautiful. But making a family is not a necessary part of marriage, is it?

@Golblado

Ms Colen is NOT "mixing up apples and oranges".  Her central theses are (1) that the secular left has triumphed in the culture wars (within western civilisation) over the country's "catholic heritage", and (2) that the "religious vacuum in Belgian society" is being filled by islam.  Both examples, homosexual marriage and the 'exception' for hijabs-in-parliament, provide  empirical evidence that supports Ms Colens's theses. Perhaps, it is you who is "mixing up", or failing to make a proper intellectual distinction, between abstract theses and empirical observations (or concrete examples)?  

While the philosophical underpinnings for a serious legal concept of "marriage" could provide a wide scope for debate, your 'reductionist' view of "marriage" as an "acclamation of a loving relationship" is not serious and straight out of 'Hollywood'.   

I don't understand why you mix things up together that don't have any relationship. You criticise homosexual marriage in the same breath as you criticise special privileges for Muslims in the Parliament.

Why? Homosexual marriage simply lets two men or two women acclaim their loving relationship.  Why would you want to deny them that? It seems only fair to me. Special privileges for the religious in Parliament are just the opposite. That is unfair. They are receiving a dispensation not available to anyone else.

Well, I think it would be outrageous if the Belgian Parliament required people to violate their religious beliefs to witness the proceedings.  Having said that, if the exemption applies only to Muslim women rather than, say, to Orthodox Jews (male and female) as well it would be disturbing.  But if it is a general exemption for religious head coverings I don't see what the problem is.

People confuse the two different conceptions of religion and the state, and often confuse militant secularism with religious neutrality. In the first conception we scrub the public square clean of all religious expression, and in the other we treat expression of religious beliefs and ideas like any other beliefs and ideas, i.e. we let them be expressed freely. I think the second model is much better.

You are talking about Christianity like it originated in your house or your family town!! My dear lady, msulims are different, no one race!  And Christianity came from my village, as Islam came from the nearby towns, and I dont say Christianity belongs to my family, neither I say Islam belongs to my grandfather!!! Europe has no race!!! History tells us its people are historic immigrants!!!

This historical survey tells us all too clearly what the future of Europe will be - thanks to the ignorant and venal Eurocrats - if there are no steps taken to reverse what is going on:

The Global Jihad.

Catholic beliefs imply that one of the cruelest things is to deny a Catholic a Requiem, all in the name of political correctness.

Migrants have also occupied Belgian churches in protest at government plans to reform asylum procedures.

There is no obligation for Muslims to respect Christian places of worship - obviously.

Migrants occupy Belgian churches

Meanwhile, the Indian Goverment is anxious to "respect the sanctity" of a mosque from which jihadists have fired on Indian security forces.

Terrorists open fire from inside mosque .

Muslims are a worldwide nuisance and threat. The man in the street knows it and is, rightly, becoming angry. The contemptible Euro-establishment knows it, too, but cares not, and tries to hide the fact.