Would you approach a woman completely covered in a burqa? Or would you simply avoid them and ask directions from a woman whose face you can see. Be honest.
I’ll add. Let’s say you are at the emergency room at a hospital. There are two women at the desk. One is a regular French woman, the other is wearing a burqa. Who would you talk to? Your own daughter is dying… Who would you talk to?
Be honest.
Let’s say you have a similar situation and the only woman behind the desk is the burqaclad woman. You can’t see her face. How can you trust her with your daughter?
Don’t you feel the need to see the face of the person you want to trust with your daughter’s life? Be honest.
France is absolutely right.
The women needing to cover themselves is not even in the Quran.
It is limited to extreme Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia.
Has France banned people from walking around in Richard Nixon masks, large coats, and carrying sacks with the Euro sign on them?
Would you feel comfortable if your dentist was wearing such a get-up? Your banker? The guy following you down an alley?
Seems that should be a higher priority than this.
I have no idea what you are getting at. There are all kinds of people we would approach on the street before others- I imagine for many American would be least likely to approach a group of black teenagers. So?
As for the emergency room, WTF? I assume that if she was hired by the hospital, she can do her job. Why wouldn’t I go to her? Afraid she might be secretly sticking her tongue out at me? Fear that she’d send my kid down the 'Christian children for burning" chute or something?
Anyway, Maybe there are plenty of women (for example, heavily-invested Muslim women, of which I hear France has a few) who would be more comfortable approaching the woman in the burqa. Don’t they count?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess you don’t actually have children. Because if your daughter is dying you’re going to flag down whoever is at the hospital to help whether it’s the chief surgeon or the janitor and you sure aren’t going to care how they’re dressed.
You’re really going to have to stretch to find a situation where you are required to trust someone you don’t want to and still have the time to be picky about help being offered from any source.
All you’ve really provided examples of is your own prejudice, even if it would be to your benefit to interact with someone you think dresses funny.
I really don’t have any problem with interacting with people when I can’t see there faces. I mean, I interact with people all the time on the phone. And in New England, if your outside in the winter, most of the people you talk to on the street are going to have their faces pretty well covered.
And honestly, even if I did have a problem with interacting with people who covered their faces, I don’t really see why my preference should be written into law.
Perhaps the emergency room situation was not a good example.
It is my problem. I feel uncomfortable around them and I wouldn’t dare starting a conversation. The complete covering instinctively tells me to “stay away”. This person is distancing themselves from you and society at large. I interpret that as isolation. Whether voluntary or enforced, covering yourself completely automatically eliminates you from society at large because when you cover yourself, you have decided to exclude yourself from that society. No one dares approach you or speak to you because the impression most people have is “do not talk to me”. I would think it’s the same in Saudi Arabia, and of course that is intentional, because women have no rights and are oppressed.
If you really think a woman covered in a burqa is pro social, then I doubt you have ever actually met one.
That’s, well, fine isn’t the right word, but it is completely understandable. But what is being done here is saying that because someone doesn’t like the way you are dressed your clothes should be made illegal.
Are you willing to open up your closet and toss out your favorite shirt because somebody doesn’t like it?
Do you get the same “stay away” feeling from the crazy guy on the corner with his sign about the world ending tomorrow wearing the tinfoil hat and clothes that haven’t been washed in weeks? I do. But that doesn’t mean I think tinfoil hats should be illegal. I have every right to judge people based on what I think of their clothes. I don’t have a right tell them how to dress.
There is a huge difference between choosing to wear one and being forced to wear one. Nobody in France was being forced to wear one. In fact, the best estimates are that only a couple thousand women in France even wore one. A couple thousand women in a country of almost 66 million. It’s unlikely that the majority of the French have even see a person wearing one in person.
French women who wear the veil aren’t being oppressed. They are perfectly capable of taking it off. There is no law against not wearing one. There is no law against not being Muslim. There is no law requiring you to remain with people who are Muslim or think that you should wear a veil. Any women in France who did wear it did so by choice.
Whether you think they chose well or not really doesn’t matter. Consenting adults have every right to choose their own religion or what type of dress code they wish to follow.
Okay, so how many women have you met who voluntarily wear a burqa? The fact that they are out protesting this new law does seem to imply they aren’t all stuck in the house. And if they are so anti-social wouldn’t this law just force them even deeper into seclusion if they feel they can never leave their house?
It seems that if the point is to encourage them to come out and spend more time around other people removing the way they feel comfortable doing so is the most counter-productive way to go about it.
Reason #840133490834 why Europe is less enlightened than America.
I phrased it like a joke, but I actually am seriously wondering:
Was it already illegal to have your face covered by a mask in certain places? Airports? Banks? Stores? Schools?
If not, is it now? Honestly, that does seem kind of reasonable.
I’d venture that I have met far more women who wear burqas (well, my experience is with a form of niqabs) than you have.
It may be hard for you to imagine, but the burqa is just a small part of their life. It’s what they wear when they go out and about- it doesn’t really play that different of a role than your shoes or your winter coat. Sure, it’s there, but it doesn’t define them or completely dominate them. They put it on, get where they are going, and then take it off. Like a car with tinted windows. That’s not the meat of life- that’s just a side note.
The vast majority of their lives pretty much the same as anyone else- enjoying home life with their families, chatting with their friends, gossiping with neighbors and meeting with groups that do activities they enjoy. Yes, these friends and social activities will be single-sex. Luckily, half of the world is female and in any city it’s quite easy to arrange interesting, engaging, all-female groups. A reading club is still a reading club if it’s all women. Jazzercise is still jazzercise if it’s during women’s night at the gym.
Yes, it’s a different way of living and they do miss out on some things. But it’s perfectly possible to wear a burqa and also have a life that is as full and as rich as anyone else. Do you really think that the only thing that makes life worth living is strange men?
Can we get a “like” button up in here?
Some places, like NY, have an anti mask law aimed at demonstrators/KKK, but a woman can wear a burqa into Saks Fifth Ave if she wants.
Women in burqas and niqabs have been traveling for a long time. You step aside with a female who can check your identity. Simple.
Um. If you’re a man wanting to talk to a woman wearing a garment that clearly states, “I am for my husband only”, what is your dealio?!
If they want to wear it, it’s their right to do so. And I’m not under the impression that all burqa-wearing is completely involuntary and the result of evil men repressing the women. But the burqa - if by burqa we’re talking about that big sack-like covering that obscures the face under a mesh net - is definitely antisocial. What is more antisocial than hiding your face under a mask? Hiding your very eyes - the most important feature of someone’s face, the things that we use to send social signals to other people, the part of the face that has inspired countless romantic feelings, songs, poetry…the eyes are the most important feature the human being has in interacting socially with others. Even beyond just the eyes, humans are facially-fixated creatures. This is a pretty indisputable fact. Someone’s face is what we use to define them as a human, to the point where people with severe facial deformities freak people out and cause kids to run away. Kids! Could you imagine raising your child with his face covered up with a mask from the day he left the womb? If not - and I doubt you can - then you can understand the vast importance of the face in human psychology. It cannot possibly be overstated.
You hide your face away, you hide a piece of your humanity.
You’re really, really not helping. And it wasn’t France that passed that ban on Shariah Law, it was Oklahoma.
If you mean in France, yes, it is now illegal for anyone to cover their face in public.
For the US you’re allowed to wear one anywhere you want, subject to the management’s policies. If a bank wants to ban people from covering their face it’s their right, although I’m unaware of any major bank with a policy of banning veils in it’s branches. I doubt public schools could ban a parent from wearing one, but if you mean as a teacher they’d have to follow the dress code like any other.
For airports/customs they’re led to a private (or semi-private at least) area and a female officer confirms everything. This isn’t just a Muslim accommodation by the way, anyone is allowed to request a private search from TSA. It’s just that it takes longer and there’s no real reason for most people to request one. They also have special rules for things like Sikh’s turbans and other clothing items like that.
They should have made it quite clear that citizenship in those colonies did not create right of entry to France. Easy in hindsight perhaps.
Maybe that’s the point. To wear the burqa means that you protect yourself from others. Women don’t wear the burqa all the time. They wear normal clothes inside the home.