Word: wearing
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Many Americans find such a prohibition distasteful. Their first argument has been that some women, for all we know, really do want to appear so garbed in public. They feel that it’s just as tyrannical for a non-Muslim majority to force Muslim women not to wear the burka as it is for Muslim men to force Muslim women to wear...
...contrast, some French anti-burkists argue that wearing the burka could be a safety hazard while driving at rush hour on crowded highways, for example. Likewise, if the burka remains legal, hardened non-Muslim criminals disguised as Muslim women could then be able to commit any number of crimes with great impunity. (Apparently, one such crime has already occurred.) Others have argued that because the French state outlaws walking down the street in the full monty, why can’t it outlaw its exact opposite? Yet another and more interesting argument has to with feminism and human rights...
...American sensibility, the issue has to be seen from the point of view of individual rights: If women want to wear this cloak, they have a perfect right to do so, even in eyes of those Americans who are most hostile to foreign ways of living. It matters not whether these women wear the burka in public or in private, because their “rights” are the same. However, public space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist...
...advocates of the ban, women who wear integral veils are simultaneously victims and perpetrators. They represent a surreptitious (if at the same time excessively visible) threat, namely the insidious spread of radical, Salafist Islam—and hence a religious and implicitly political menace. The proposed ban targets the practice as fundamentally at odds with French republican principles: both secularism and a (historically recent) commitment to gender equality. The new law thus seems, at first glance, to be a logical— and legal—extension of the commitments outlined in a 2004 law on “la?...
...said for the proposed law on the integral veil. The Conseil d’Etat, which provides legal guidance to the executive and serves as France’s highest administrative court, has twice raised serious doubts about the constitutionality of this new law. After all, the women who wear “integral veils” are, by the Ministry of the Interior’s own admission, consenting adults who do so of their own volition. “Laïcité” is not applicable either, because the law targets a legally nebulous conception...