< late Latin lāicus, Greek λᾱϊκός, < λᾱός the people. Compare Old French laic, laique.
Of or pertaining to a layman or the laity; non-clerical, secular, temporal. (OED)
"She has been accused, as one of her critics put it, of being 'focused on Islam'. She would say, 'focused on laïcité'–a concept so central for French republican ideology that the word 'secularism' only begins to describe it...
"In most ways, Chanteloup is as far as you can get in France from Badinter's Left Bank and country-house world and her archival preoccupations. In another, it's a microcosm of all her beliefs about women and laicity...
"'Then, from one day to the next, a young man working at the crèche stopped shaking hands with the rest of us,' Baleato told me. 'He said that we weren't allowed to touch him, or even look at him when we talked. The next day, he refused to touch the female babies he was supposed to be taking care of. We were able to fire him–our crèchehas a laic charter–but by then a third of the Muslim women working there had accepted his demands...
"But, babies being babies, they do not fall under the secular protection of the education law. Badinter is determined to change that. She is now the official marraine, or godmother, of Baby Loup, and, with the help of the press, has made it into a symbol of both laicity and, as Baleato puts it, 'the plight of immigrant women in France.'"
- Jane Kramer, "Against nature: Elisabeth Badinter's contrarian feminism", 25 July 2011 The New Yorker
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