As with opposition to the Iraq war, the veil controversy is not about what it pretends to be about at all. Banning the veil in public schools is simply a way for the government to seem to doing something about the failure of integration while in fact doing nothing at all. Not only is the proposed law, as you point out, inconsistent with constitutional protections on freedom of religion, it also singularly fails to deal with what is in fact the real problem: the presence in France of between 5 and 8 million Muslims. And that, of course, is not going to change anytime soon.