French secularism, or laïcité, is a two-fold concept: It denotes the absence of religion in government affairs, and the absence of government in religious affairs. And it was enshrined by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which read: “No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order.” The French hold their strain of secularism quite dear, and even have an agency, the Stasi Commission, committed to rooting out undue overlaps of church and state where they exist.

The basis of French secularism, like our Constitution’s Establishment Clause, is an arena for fierce debate. Drainville might argue that the display of overt religious symbols by public employees would “interfere with the established Law and Order”—the idea behind similar French laws, including a 2010 ban on wearing face-covering garments in public, and a 2004 ban on wearing religious symbols in public schools.

But Drainville and his allies seem less interested in warning of potential disruptions to public order than in making questionable appeals to progressivism. At a hearing for the bill last week, Michelle Blanc, a transgender woman, spoke for nearly an hour in support of Bill 60, appealing to Quebecers’ largely pro-LGBT sentiments (same-sex marriage has been legal in the province since 2004). “When I see a veil, the mental image I have is of all the gays who were hung high and low in the public square … in certain Arab countries,” she said. But Muslims are not an ideological monolith. As Michel Seymour, a professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal (and a Quebec sovereigntist), told The Globe and Mail after testifying against Bill 60, “There are fundamentalists who don’t wear headscarves. There are people who wear headscarves who aren’t fundamentalists. We’re firing at the wrong target.”

The charter also seeks to affirm gender equality through its restrictions on dress: “The National Assembly reiterates the importance it attaches to the value of equality between women and men … [and] recognizes that it is appropriate to provide for certain measures to ensure that these values are upheld,” the bill states. The wording suggests that certain religious symbols—the Islamic veil, for instance—speak to the wearer’s inherent disregard for gender equality. Again, this is not something that can be assumed of all 1.6 billion adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

Similar faux-feminist arguments were made by French politicians to defend the 2010 ban on veils, but they were ultimately corruptions of feminist philosophy, ensnared in Western ideas of female empowerment. As Hind Ahmas, a divorced mother and French Muslim who chooses to wear a niqab, told The Guardian in 2011: “The politicians claimed they were liberating us; what they’ve done is to exclude us from the social sphere. Before this law, I never asked myself whether I’d be able to make it to a cafe or collect documents from a town hall. One politician in favour of the ban said niqabs were ‘walking prisons’. Well, that’s exactly where we’ve been stuck by this law.”