re: #3 HappyWarrior

Frankly, it seems silly to me to ban a certain article of clothing because you don’t like what it represents. Honestly, this law is in the same spirit of Islamic societies that ban women wearing jeans or skirts. It’s just another extreme.

Have to disagree here. Headscarves are one thing, but a garment that fully covers the face except for the eyes is entirely different. How much time have you spent in public around women dressed that way? It’s dehumanizing, anti-social, and alienating in every sense of the word. I completely agree that it should be banned, kind of along the lines of banning female genital mutilation except that the burqa affects both the woman wearing it and those around her, all the time.

Speaking as a western woman, I feel highly unsettled any time I’m around fully-veiled women, and in this case it is actually not because of culturally-constructed racism. It’s because I see a woman who is always being hidden from the world, a woman who is defined as a dirty secret within public life, a woman whose visibility is marked as socially unbearable. And those are, to my mind, terrible things.