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Well you are doing that. However, the starting point in any attempt to deny people the right to decide for themselves what to wear is their right to decide for themselves what to wear.

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And yet that is what the French are doing. You are creating a false dichotomy Soren. No matter how desperately you try to frame the issue around something that is tangentially related, it is still forcing women to expose themselves. Freedom always challenges when people choose something different to you. You have failed that challenge.

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It does not matter how unreasonable these women are. They still have rights. Many of these women genuinely feel exposed. Try walking down the main street in the same gear you wear swimming if you don't believe me. You would happily wear those clothes in front of other people, yet all it takes is a change of context and suddenly you feel exposed. Just because these women are on the far end of the spectrum does not mean they don't feel that way and does not somehow negate their basic rights.

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It could be one group in ten million, but it would still not change the basic argument - that people are no longer free to choose.

How far can you expect the government to go in forcing people to dress normal so as not to upset the culture police like Soren? Why are you all so incapable of seeing the issue when other people are at the sharp end of it?

freediver wrote on Apr 15^th, 2011 at 10:55pm:


FD, just because you are able to endlessly repeat something stupid doesn't mean your argument has any force. Expecting les citoyennes to show their faces in the land of liberty, equality and fraternity is not forcing them to 'expose' themselves.
For you to argue that it is their universal, inaliananble human right to ignore the customs of France is just plain stupid.

The French are perfectly within their rights to demand that their customs be observed and respected. Face covering is not among their customs. Their entire self-understanding is contrary to what the niqab/burqa is.

Foolosophy wrote on Apr 16^th, 2011 at 9:00pm:


It doesn't matter what you say, you ARE a drongo. There is no way out of that for you.

Soren wrote on Apr 16^th, 2011 at 9:15pm:

Foolosophy wrote on Apr 16^th, 2011 at 9:49pm:




How is showing a man  (uncovered face) looking up at whatever that is have any relevance to the burkha debate?

darkhall67 wrote on Apr 15^th, 2011 at 10:01am:


I think there's a case for banning all four. First we have to be clear about what it is we want banned and to do that you have to make clear what the legislation will say.

I know Soren, Mavis, et al have said it's about covering the face; I don't agree. For me it's about banning the 'in your face' flag of Islamofascism. I accept that Islamofascism exists, I also accept that the vast majority of Muslims do not fall into this category.

Uniforms are always problematic. Sometimes in the workplace there's a good reason for them. It's always handy to know who the medics are or who works for the supermarket. Outside of the workplace uniforms are an extreme of gangsterism. We are in the gang, you are not. As a society we're already looking at this aspect of uniforms. Rightly or wrongly, (it's another topic) bikies are being outlawed and for many years wearing their club colours has been banned from some venues.

The problem of religious identity uniforms first arose in France because of long standing rules in schools about overt displays of religiosity. Overt displays of religiosity can be effected just as easily by the shayla as the burqa.

If you're going to legislate to make showing the face compulsory, you're going to affect a whole range of people like fishermen wearing scarvs and balaclavas, or the wearing of full face bike helmets. If you make an exception for people fishing or riding bikes you're saying the burkha can only been worn on a motorbike, bizarre.

You can fairly say that uniforms or religious uniforms, divisive symbols, aren't to be worn outside of workplaces and sporting arenas. Your society will be the better for it.

It's not about 'rights' and 'freedoms', everybody has to put up with limits on those. You'd think it would be pretty simple to have an inalienable right to grow whatever herbs you want or even to be buried where you want. Even the right for mothers to breast feed still crops up as an issue. We still have laws that stigmatise newborn babies depending on whether their parents are bound by 'holy matrimony' or not. Which is, of course to say that in our secular societies religion still has ways of interferring with the law.

I believe the benefits of banning the burqa outweight the negatives freediver. I don't ignore that there are... difficulties imposing such a ban.

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So if that's an accurate reflection of the French position we can see that it's a bad day for chicken men and Father Christmasses, amongst others. 

I think you could say that my position is that while I like the idea, I think that banning the burqa is impractical. I don't think that you can have legislation that targets only Muslims. I think that you could legislate to ban 'religious clothing' but you'd have to include monks, nuns and orthodox Jews at al.