A personal choice of association/conversion != the government mandating against a religious article. Quebec tried that bullshit a couple of years ago, but thought they had a crafty way around it: they would ban ALL religious articles from any public worker (including teachers, hospital staff, etc, covering all religious articles of any sort). Just like there’s nothing in the Koran that mandates Burkas, Hijabs, Keffiyahs(?) or any other specific head/face/body covering, but there’s nothing in the Bible that mandates wearing a cross on a necklace either, right?
Just as the Quebec Charter of Values, the Burka Ban was a plain-faced regulation designed to discriminate against a religion (or in Quebec’s version, ALL religions).
This would seem to call for a similar law relating to the use of telephones, email, letters, and any other form of communication where the face is not visible. And what about people or cultures with rich body language? Maybe British reserve is unfair to more open cultures who communicate more transparently.
Or maybe those seriously offended by not being able to see her face could just give the nice veiled lady their cellphone number and she can chat with them from across the room that way.
In those forms of communication the handicap is mutual. If you’re speaking face to face with someone who is hiding their face, then the party who is exposed is placed at a disadvantage.
The issue with the burka is that the wearer is protected —in a way that equally bad mannered wearers of crash helmets, mirrored sunglasses, hoodies and masks are not— through accusations of racism. But it isn’t a race issue, it’s a culture issue and in countries with cultures with roots in Western Europe it’s culturally inappropriate. I think we’ll agree that failure to behave in a culturally aware manner is crass bad manners?
I don’t support banning any garment but the burqa is a fucking joke created hundreds of year after muhammad’s passing, not referred to in any way in any formative islamic texts and insisted upon by fundamentalist assholes. It’s not religious freedom to wear it, it’s servitude to those who bent religion to their own tastes. I still think people who are stupid enough to wear them can do so (hey, it saves the time of finding out they’re idiots the ol’ fashioned way) but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid.
Edit: in some sort of your enemy’s enemy is your friend kind of deal I also like the burqa cause it gets conservatives so upset.
The handicap may be mutual, but it’s often forced on one party by the other. If I want to speak to you in person, but you will only do it by phone. Or I want to do it by phone, but you’ll only do it by email. If the unequal status of veils bother you, you could always insist on speaking only be telephone or email, where you will both be similarly handicapped.
But you’ll still have the conceptual problem of reserved or opaque cultures, cultures with differing standards of body language, etc.
I don’t know. Culture changes so rapidly that I think that insisting on cultural stasis only in some select areas is difficult to support. 60 or so years ago you didn’t have a culture of fruit in the winter, schoolboys wearing long pants, adults wearing short pants, women wearing any pants, people having pre-marital sex, people eating sushi with chopsticks, etc., etc. It seems a bit silly to accept that culture changes—and sometimes quite rapidly—in other aspects of life, but reject cultural changes in other aspects of life. I think this is especially the case when culture change happens as a result of invading someone’s country, displacing their leaders, economically exploiting them (all of which would be crass bad manners in Western Europe, I hope), and then finally letting some of them move to their colonizer’s country. It’s not a coincidence that those covering their faces in France are from her former colonies in the Maghreb.
(Also, as a minor aside, we’ve got our own form of hoodie racism on this side of the pond.)
They’re going to have to print more. This is going to be like Candle in the Wind.
It’s funny, because the attacks may have secured CH’s future - the article mentions that they’ve been struggling financially and were recently appealing for donations.
