{"id":3140,"date":"2007-01-31T07:27:12","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T07:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/bienvenue.html"},"modified":"2007-01-31T07:27:12","modified_gmt":"2007-01-31T07:27:12","slug":"bienvenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/bienvenue.html","title":{"rendered":"Bienvenue!"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Quebec village lays out some ground rules:<\/a><\/p>\n

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A sign at the entrance of this rural Quebec town says: Herouxville welcomes you.<\/p>\n

Unless, that is, you plan on stoning a woman to death, sending your kids to school with a kirpan or covering your face other than on Halloween.<\/p>\n

The town council of Herouxville, a sleepy town dominated by a towering Roman Catholic church, has adopted a declaration of "norms" that it says would-be immigrants should be aware of before they settle in this town.<\/p>\n

Among them, it is forbidden to stone women or burn them with acid.<\/p>\n

Children cannot carry weapons to school. That includes ceremonial religious daggers like kirpans even though the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Sikhs can carry kirpans in schools.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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However, children can swim in a pool with other children — boys and girls alike because they can’t be segregated.<\/p>\n

And for the record, female police officers in Herouxville, 165 km northwest of Montreal, can arrest male suspects. Also part of the declaration is to allow women to drive, dance and make decisions on their own.<\/p>\n

"We’re telling people who we are," said Andre Drouin, one of six town councillors and the driving force behind the declaration passed earlier this month.<\/p>\n

The small town has only one immigrant family and wants more.<\/p>\n

But Drouin said the declaration, which was posted on the town’s website and sent to the provincial and federal immigration ministers, is the result of a number of recent culture clashes across the country.<\/p>\n

In Montreal, a dispute erupted after the windows of a gym were obscured to block the view of exercising women from the Hasidic Jewish synagogue across the street, and swimming pools have been asked for gender-specific swim times to accommodate religious groups.<\/p>\n

Men were banned from prenatal classes at one Montreal community centre to accommodate Muslim, Sikh and Hindu women and a city police publication came under fire for suggesting female officers should defer to male colleagues when dealing with men from certain religions<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Quebec village lays out some ground rules: A sign at the entrance of this rural Quebec town says: Herouxville welcomes you. Unless, that is, you plan on stoning a woman to death, sending your kids to school with a kirpan or covering your face other than on Halloween. The town council of Herouxville, a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBienvenue! - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/bienvenue.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bienvenue! - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A Quebec village lays out some ground rules: A sign at the entrance of this rural Quebec town says: Herouxville welcomes you. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}