re: #38 SidewaysQuark

Whether one chooses to be stupid is one’s own choice.

At what point is a brainwashed person not really making their own choices anymore?

The idea that women HAVE choices is not necessarily encouraged in the most extremely fundamentalist households (of many religions). A Jordanian woman I met in university family housing had very little power within her family. One day her 8 year old son kicked over the sand castle his 5 year old sister had made in the communal sandbox. (The mom was in her apartment….) When the little girl cried, he started to kick her rather savagely, so all the moms present stood up and called out for him to stop. I escorted the boy back to the front door where I explained the situation to his mom. She looked helplessly about and told me that the boy was responsible for keeping her daughter “in line”. I told her that she needed to keep her son from physically assaulting his siblings. She told me that it was not her place to tell her son (a fricking 8 year old!) how to manage his sisters. I was stunned! This woman did cover her head, though not her face, and I did not expect such “old-fashioned” (backwards…..) attitudes in a family affiliated with the U. I took a step back, shook my head and said that then her husband needed to explain to the boy the unacceptability of such brutishness. Furthermore, if we saw him acting like that again the other mothers might feel like we had to call child protective services.

Apparently the warning worked——-at least outside their apartment. But seriously, this woman came from a household that was modern enough to let her show her face yet still treated HER like a zero, ranking beneath her 8 year old. How much worse might it be in many households where the strictest dress codes are enforced?

The memory of the girls who burned to death in Saudi Arabia because they were not sufficiently clothed to flee a burning building haunts me and perhaps that is why I am likely to side with people who want to ban it even though “it is just a piece of clothing….” The fact that the men who kept those young Saudi girls from escaping awful and unnecessary deaths in a fire were unable to understand that same idea———that it is just a piece of clothing——-shows what a dangerous mindset it reveals. That wearing such an item could possibly be more important than saving lives is a superstition that must be done away with. Religious freedom is not absolute. We do not allow child sacrifice and we should not tolerate treating women as nonentities whatever the religion, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or what have you! When you treat women as nonentities to begin with it is easier to kill them. I think banning the niqab will ultimately save lives.