Amid the range of commentary — from high-minded to grubby — on the proposed Quebec ban on religious garb in certain public spaces, one very large group has not put its hand up.

We are atheists. We are a bashful people, we are the Canadian Ladies of Shalott, the foster children of silence and slow time, oh wait, that was Keats, not Tennyson. My effort to poeticize non-believers is failing badly.

We are not glamorous, we non-believers. We have neither gilded domes nor synagogues nor those other things the Swiss banned, um, minarets. Such is my lack of interest in religion that I had to Google all three nouns in the last sentence.

We atheists/humanists may occasionally meet in little groups for a chat but we don’t get the tax breaks that churches do. We are innocent Crakers, we have no special clothing or jewelry, no outer signs that we place our faith not in an imaginary deity but in the decency and courage of our fellow humans.

You will notice us only by our courteous silence, fuelled by the notion that it seems odd to speak publicly about the baseline of normality, so we speak into a mirror. Well, the mirror has crack’d, people, and we atheists are speaking up.

We approve of freedom of religion. But we atheists have a right to be free from religion.

Our atheist/humanist beliefs should be respected as much as any other group’s. It is one of the great glories of Canadian life.

For all that the Americans claim to have a separation of church and state, there are few nations more driven by religious fanaticism. Look at that deranged Pastor Terry Jones driving around with 3,000 gasoline-soaked Korans in his truck.

Or look at Ireland, reluctantly having finally passed an abortion law making it marginally less likely that pregnant women will be allowed to die while doctors tap their foot.

This is Canada. We don’t do that here. Or do we? Will we? I can’t tell. The absurdist debate has followed two rules: Godwin’s Law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches”) and Betteridge’s Law (“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’ ”)

An Ontario hospital is planning to lure medical students at McGill to leave Montreal — for Oshawa, of all places — by running a deeply cynical ad featuring the world’s prettiest female medical student in a head scarf. She’s so harmless!

The ad says: “We don’t care what’s on your head. We care what’s in it.”

Exactly. I care what’s in a doctor’s head too and if he or she is wearing the large cross shown in the now notorious poster of forbidden Quebec religious gear, I will decline to see that doctor and I will warn off my women friends. Religion has always been a weapon for controlling women. It must not stand.

If that doctor cared about the sensibilities of her female patients, he or she wouldn’t be wearing a large cross or a niqab, an emblem of the mistreatment of women through the ages. Why wear it at work?

I drift off into a memory of the worst medical experience I’ve ever had, at the hands of an old Catholic gynecologist. He was wearing a hat pinned with fish hooks. I was very young. Another poem, an Atwood, comes to mind. “You fit into me like a hook into an eye/a fishhook/an open eye.”

Back to the present day. That Quebec doctor has made a choice. And the Quebec government has made a choice that it won’t employ people who do this, especially in daycares and elementary schools where children are kept free and clear of old religious values.

I am cynical about the Oshawa ad. It didn’t show a bearded Muslim male or Jewish man in a skullcap because it didn’t dare. The hospital is being as selective with its PR as the Quebec government is careless. It is playing to the crowd, and what a strange shape-shifting crowd it is.

I deplore the Quebec rules even more than I deplore religious belief. They are a cue for religious and racial prejudice and the fact that they are superficially rational makes them worse.

One of the things that makes me a poor excuse for a feminist is that I care more about real life than theory. The patriarchy sure has some wonderful men born into it.

Quebecers are entitled to a public space free of religion, just as Ontario taxpayers should not have to fund a Catholic school system, but they could not have chosen a nastier way to go about it.

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In real life, no Quebec hospital is going to rip the head scarf off the pretty lady GP. As CTV has reported, more than two million Quebecers don’t have a family doctor. Presumably they are praying for one.

This mess is a rat’s nest of manufactured offence about hats that makes Canada’s most progressive province look bad, religionists smug and we atheists — alone and without a leader — head back into the shadows.

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