Howard Adelman and Pierre Anctil, Eds.: Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Howard Adelman and Pierre Anctil, eds. Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 151 pp. Notes. References. $21.95 sc. This thoughtful book brings together a philosopher and a historian as contributing editors and three professors from the fields of English, Judaic Studies, and Law. Excluding the notes and references, the six essays total only 112 pages. All of the authors, except Howard Adelman, are Quebecers. The Quebec media distorted and sensationalized a few minor incidents involving the kirpan, the hijab, and the segregation of men and women, turning them into incendiary issues. These were then exploited for political gain by the right-wing Action democratique du Quebec to convey the false impression that religious minorities were making excessive demands, a characterization that fit with deeply-rooted stereotypes among Quebec francophones. Deploying the most Canadian of tactics to avoid addressing the place of religion in the social sphere, Quebec's Liberal government launched a commission to probe reasonable accommodation. Chaired by two internationally acclaimed Quebec intellectuals, the commission grappled with reconciling the multi-ethnic and religious diversity that is contemporary Quebec with the Quiet Revolution's embrace of secularism, known in the province by the French republican term, laicite. The commissioners proposed a moderate form of laicite. They rejected what Jose Woehrling terms rigid secularism in favour of an open secularism consistent with the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights and case law. Among their recommendations, the commissioners called for the removal of religious symbols in governmental institutions. However, even before their report's release, the government announced, and a unanimous vote in the National Assembly affirmed, that the prominent crucifix hanging above the Speaker's chair in the Assembly would remain. Passions unleashed at the commission's hearings included some xenophobic and racist ranting. Bina Toledo Friewald draws on social psychology to analyze the briefs presented to the commission. Howard Adelman's concluding chapter offers some survey data that contrast the opinions of francophones and anglophones. Data from CBC's more recent and massive Vote Compass survey during the 2011 federal election revealed that Quebecers are the most receptive Canadians to immigration. However, they are also the least tolerant of a public presence of non-Christian religious symbols, beliefs, and rituals. In Quebec, interculturalism--the pursuit of a common French-speaking civic culture rooted in the values of freedom, liberty, and human rights--is counterposed to Canadian multiculturalism, which is considered language-blind (4), as treating all cultures as equals and therefore denigrating Quebec's distinctive collective personality. Adelman offers a comparative chapter. It is limited to the Canadian, Quebec, and French cases. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".