French national Diaba Konaté — considered a breakout star in this year’s NCAA Women’s March Madness tournament — can’t play Olympic basketball for the French national team during the Paris Olympics. Why? Because she wears a hijab. This was a brewing issue long before the Opening Ceremony’s widely panned performance that many took as a parody of the Last Supper of Christ, which the organizers denied.
While other countries’ athletes can wear a hijab during competition, French women cannot due to a strict interpretation of a secular, religion-neutral, public society. This French policy, called Laïcité, is understood as a formal separation of the religion and state that includes the removal of religious values and symbols from the public sphere. The secular values of liberty, equality, and fraternity are publicly lifted up, while religion is meant to be the private and personal sphere.
The removal of religion is considered by some to create a neutral and religiously free environment, but for people of faith it is seen as privileging the non-religious sphere above the religious. For more on this debate, see a late comprise French Olympic officials came to by allowing a cap to substitute for a hijab.