The proposal to ban new minarets in Switzerland.

BBC reports:

Partial results from the poll which closed at 1100 GMT indicated that the German-speaking canton of Lucerne accepted the ban, while French-speaking cantons Geneva and Vaud voted against....

What is it about minarets specifically?

There are unofficial Muslim prayer rooms, and planning applications for new minarets are almost always refused.

The BBC could be clearer here. Is a Muslim place of worship "unofficial" if it lacks a minaret? Regulation of buildings can be neutral toward religion, and one can imagine a government regulation that happens to exclude the construction of minarets. But this is a case of targeting religion. (A ban like this in the United States would violate both the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.)

Supporters of a ban claim that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and a legal system - Sharia law - which are incompatible with Swiss democracy.

So it is not only discrimination against religion, it is a restriction of the sort of speech that is most valued in a democracy — criticism of the government. This argument, an attempt to excuse discrimination against religion, makes the ban worse, not better.

But others say...

One hardly needs to hear from the other side. The supporters make the argument against themselves.

... the referendum campaign has incited hatred. On Thursday the Geneva mosque was vandalised for the third time during the campaign....

The president of Zurich's Association of Muslim Organisations, Tamir Hadjipolu, told the BBC that if the ban was implemented, Switzerland's Muslim community would live in fear.

"This will cause major problems because during this campaign in the last two weeks different mosques were attacked, which we never experienced in 40 years in Switzerland.

"So with the campaign... the Islamaphobia has increased very intensively."

Now, this is the situation without the ban, so it's not obvious whether actually having the ban would make things worse or better. If the campaign for the ban is the problem, then Hadjipolu too is critical of free speech. Ironically, both the supporters and the opponents of the ban are afraid of free speech.

ADDED: Swiss feminists lead the fight against minarets, which they portray as "'male power symbols' and reminders of Islam’s oppression of women."

AND: Final results:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

Roman Polanski is now in custody for having sex with a 45-year-old woman.

He did that that 32 years ago, when she was 13. You would think that by now it would be — if not forgotten or even forgiven — at least irrelevant. He's avoided capture for so long as he's lolled about in Europe, collecting kudos, and he's gotten so old — 76 — that it seems as though the reprehensible crime only exists in the sealed-away past.

And now that another woman — a 61-year-old woman, who, when she was 21 (not as young as 13), murdered his long-ago wife and his never-born child — has died, that other world seems impossibly distant and deceased. His victimizer Susan Atkins is dead, and the woman he victimized, Samantha Geimer, has settled with him. It might be part of the secret settlement, but Geimer does not want the old criminal charges pursued.

Nonetheless, the Swiss police arrested Roman Polanski when he touched down in Zurich to pick up another prize. Why did that happen?

"There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming," ministry spokesman Guido Balmer told The Associated Press. "That's why he was taken into custody."

Oh! There is memory, and there is law, and you cannot rise above it, not by extreme suffering or extreme old age, not by great fame or great accomplishment, and not by profuse reconciliation with the victim.

Roman Polanski has been called to account at long last.

"One can cook really delicious things with [breast milk]. However, it always needs to be mixed with a bit of whipped cream..."

It's on the menu in Switzerland, thanks to a loophole in the law.

The food control authority in Switzerland was initially confused by the apparent loophole in local legislation regulating the use of human milk and it was not clear whether Mr Locher could actually be banned from serving his specialities.

"Humans as producers of milk are simply not envisaged in the legislation.

"They are not on the list of approved species such as cows and sheep, but they are also not on the list of the banned species such as apes and primates," Rolf Etter of the Zurich food control laboratory said.

As I say in the sidebar: I'm a law professor, and sometimes I write about law. To that I add: Sometimes I blog about breasts. And sometimes I blog about breasts and the law.

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You know, Justice Scalia was just bitching about law school courses like "'Law and Poverty,' or other made-up stuff." I'd just like to point out that one could do a course called "Law and Breasts." There's this topic of whether a restaurant can serve breast milk, but there are all sorts of other things. I can easily find many things in my old blog posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

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If you think the subject of food made with breast milk is funny -- or if you have any sense of humor at all -- you should buy Season 5 of "The Ricky Gervais Show" (the podcast). There's a bit where Ricky is thoroughly disgusted by a hippie woman who brings a housewarming gift of rice pudding and informs the recipient that she's made it with her breast milk.

Protesting minarets.

In Switzerland.

I can't believe this artist.

BBC reports:

An art work purportedly made from excess fat from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sold for $18,000 (£9,862).

Switzerland-based artist Gianni Motti claims to have bought the fat from a clinic where the leader had a liposuction operation performed....

"I came up with the idea of because soap is made of pig fat, and I thought how much more appropriate it would be if people washed their hands using a piece of Berlusconi," Motti told Welwoche magazine.

We're asked to think the artist thought this up entirely independently of the widely known film/book "Fight Club." What do you think that bar of soap in Brad's hand is?

Whoever bought the thing is a fool for buying conceptual art where the concept is already extremely well known from a previously existing art work.