Of course you have to pay attention to the affiliative and ascriptive identities of the people you govern. Managing such identities is the hardest part of state construction and maintenance. 1/

The question is *how* you must pay attention, whether it is wise tgat certain understandings of what those identities are be somehow reified as real and granted rights claims by outside parties that then must constrain the state in how it conceives of and shapes its public. /fin