CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: In Paris today, a big debate in the French parliament. It swirls around the wearing of religious garments in public schools, an issue that has sparked demonstrations across the country. We take you live to Paris now and Jim Bittermann. He has more for us this morning about that -- good morning, Jim.</s>JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. In fact, it would ban any kind of conspicuous evidence of religious faith, including Jewish skullcaps and Christian crosses. However, it's really aimed at Muslim head scarves. It comes after years of discussion within schools about head scarves, after months of investigation by a special presidential commission that will now face in the parliament days of debate about this issue. Basically, it comes down to what one of my colleagues in the press said, very neatly summarized it, a way of guaranteeing not only freedom of religion, but freedom from religion, because that presidential commission that investigated this issue found that many young Muslim women were being coerced into wearing their head scarves, either by their parents, by peers or perhaps in some cases even by fundamentalist Muslim groups. And so the government is going to try to legislate the problem away. There will be three days of debate. A hundred and forty people will talk about it. But, in fact, it seems very unlikely that this bill will fail. It's almost certain to go through. Sixty-three percent of the seats in the parliament belong to Jacques Chirac's party, and even some of the opposition say they're going to vote for it. So it looks like this law is going to go through. But a lot of people dissent on the basis of the fact that it's going to be largely unenforceable. It's going to be very difficult to enforce this law and some people say it'll create more problems than it'll solve because it'll stigmatize some of these young ladies -- Carol.</s>COSTELLO: All right, we'll check back with you. Jim Bittermann live from Paris this morning.
In Paris, Big Debate in French Parliament