The Burqua Ban

[marydell]

For women who observe very strict Purdah, a burqua or other face-and-body-concealing garment allows them to leave their homes, go to their children's schools, go to the hospital, and participate in society in other ways that would normally entail too much public exposure.

Take away the garment and you take away the freedom it offers. Sure, some women will respond by going out in public with bare faces, Vive la République! But others will respond--whether by their own choice or someone else's--by not appearing in public at all any more.

So those pricks in the French government are most likely sentencing a small number of their countrywomen to lifetime house arrest, and doing it in the name of liberté.  That's pretty fucked up.

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Well said.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Yes. If the household believes in burqa, then if you take away the burqa they lose access to the outside world.

Odd how politicians don't think things through.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

I can be reduced to splutters of rage in record time when discussing the recent policy of the state university of Turkey that forbade the headscarf-- not even the full burqua, but any kind of hijab for women. A government denying women education at all, let alone based on their religion, and in the name of a "secular state"-- GAAAH!

Somebody break out a dictionary and demonstrate to these people that "being forced to conceal one's religion" =/= "religious freedom."

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

At least in the case of Turkey, it is a majority Muslim country deciding for itself. (Turkey has long had a policy of no hijab in government buildings, and other measures encouraging secularism.)

This is outright xenophobia and racism.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

At least in the case of Turkey, it is a majority Muslim country deciding for itself.

That removes the xenophobia charge, but I'm not convinced it makes it at all defensible. It's one flavor of Islam deciding it gets to run the lives of adherents of other flavors-- I am put in mind of the centuries-long bans on Catholics holding office or attending university in the Protestant-run British Isles.

That's not secularism, in my book; secularism would be a strong law forbidding the state to interfere *either way* in personal religious matters that do not impinge on others. I think it still falls under pernicious religious discrimination, even if it is between siblings rather than strangers.

[sabotabby]

It's a strange argument, because it implies that women are wearing burquas by choice (rather than being oppressed) and thus can choose whether or not they wear one. But the justification is that they're freeing the wimminz. Of course women are just going to stay inside—if you're so religious, or so tightly controlled by your family, that you wear one in the first place, you're not going to suddenly take it off because the government tells you to.

Yet another example of concern trolling IRL, and just more men telling women how they should look, regardless of whether said men are secular or fundamentalist nutjobs.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I'll note the following:

(1) The left abstained (the 204 members of the Socialist, Communist and Green Parties that form the centre-left coalition in the National Assembly collectively abstained rather than voting non).

(2) Secularism has been a central part of the republican identity of France since the Dreyfus Affair.* French secularism involves the complete removal of religion from the public sphere. Religious marriages, for example, have no legal weight in France. You get married at the town hall. Then, if you're religious, you have a ceremony at the church, synagogue, temple, or masjid.

* Catholic support for the anti-Dreyfusards sealed the deal here. When the Republic was restored at the end of World War II, the Catholic de Gaulle was strongly insistent on a secular republic; he was just as insistent on it in the constitution of the Fifth Republic which was written to his taste in 1958.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I would be a lot less bothered by what they're doing if they were purely waving the flag of secularism (although if they're serious about that they should also outlaw small hats on men). But there has been a LOT of rhetoric about freeing women in all of this, and I think this law accomplishes the exact opposite of that.

p.s., interesting about the Dreyfus Affair. *goes off to read*

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

True, there has been a lot of rhetoric about freeing women. All of it from people who historically haven't done that much about it. If I recall, though, the wearing of crucifixes, in some circumstances, got outlawed a little while back. As to kippahs and other skullcaps, you have a very good point.