Quebec Gov't Tells Veiled Muslims "Go to the back of the line"

However, if a woman in a skirt were asked to lift said skirt to show proof of an ankle or knee implant, no genitals or underwear shown, she’d still be given a female officer (and a privacy partition) to do so. Been there, done that.

Yes, because actions which do not harm anyone – women wearing niqab – are completely analogous to statutory rape. Exactly the same thing. :rolleyes:

Seriously. The oh, poor men, so harmed by these women who won’t let them see their faces argument is perhaps the most banal objection to niqabi in western culture I can begin to imagine. You do not have the right to see any part of anyone else’s body, male, female or other. If you feel disrespected because someone won’t show you a part of their body, the problem is largely with you.

You don’t say. My, if only, perhaps, that post wasn’t directed at you. It almost does look that way. :rolleyes:

um, yes, because more probably than not you’ll be exposing your groin area (i.e. not your cooze but high enough for it to still be considered private) - or at least there’s a good chance that it may happen, so it’s done out of caution. plus, there’s a certain dynamic going on when a security agent takes you aside and commands you to do things that in our culture is met with a requirement that it be done by a member of the same sex.

no, you don’t have a right but in western secular culture it’s mighty odd if you don’t go out in public showing at the very minimum your face (excepting cold weather bundling up). there should be a recognition of these cultural mores when people voluntarily immigrate into a society.

I don’t know if this changes the point of view of anyone, but I just wanted to point out that the French class the Montreal woman was taking was being paid for by the Québec government and had a curriculum specifically designed to help the student “develop a better understanding of Québec and facilitate integration into Québec society.”

This is not an example of a regular student, paying tuition or other academic fees in order to learn a language and/or complete degree/diploma requirements. This course had the intention of revealing Québec culture and evaluating the students on oral interaction, written comprehension and expression, and was being paid for by the government.

For a student to have chosen to apply to take such a course and receive the free funding, and then refusing to acknowledge the elements of the course that are Québec/Canadian culture (such as speaking to both men and women, for example) seems a little odd. The cliché about looking a gift horse in the mouth comes to mind… there are other ways to learn the language and history of Québec, but taking a free integration course and then refusing to integrate changes my view of the woman and situation somewhat, though I’m having trouble expressing how!

Horseshit. The principle of egalitarianism in a free society that says you don’t hide your face from certain groups of people while voluntarily interacting with them is just as valid as the principle of extreme modesty in some fundamentalist Islamic societies that says it’s immodest for women’s faces to be seen by any men except their family members. It’s not “banal” to uphold one principle when it conflicts with the other.

There’s a good deal of sexism about the concept of modesty underlying the attempted trivialization of this issue, IMO. If the gender roles were reversed, with men refusing to show their faces to women on the grounds that, say, their religion holds that women are inferior creatures who don’t deserve the light of the male countenance, I bet we’d be hearing a lot less condescending dismissive talk about “oh, it’s just a veil, it’s not hurting anybody”.

I agree with Quebec. These women are immigrants to an established culture. If they don’t like the rules, they can leave.:rolleyes:

But that’s the thing. You don’t have one culture. You have a mosaic. A bunch of different cultures all glued together. Yet, for some reason, one piece of the mosaic gets what they want, while another piece does not.

There’s no logical reason for any part of your body to be considered private.

Your ancestors were once emigrants to your society. Are you guys stupid enough to think you started out with a certain society and then everyone else just had to change to match it?

What you don’t seem to get is that the entire idea that this culture is the one culture everyone has to be is itself bigotry. It’s you saying that your culture is better than theirs. Rather than let the issue slowly resolve itself, you want to make people genuinely mad, forcing them to change. And, one day, it’s going to come back and bite you.

Gah. All you’d have to do to be reasonable would be to let people know ahead of time what gender the photographer is, so the women can come on the women photographer days/time and not hold up the line. It’s not like you really need to let the woman get to the front, have her ask, and deny her just because she dared ask.

You know, I actually supported the teacher before, because you had made reasonable accommodations for her not to have to be in the class. But now you are being unreasonable. I actually hope it does come back to bite you. You deserve it.

Yeah, there’s no structure of culture in canada but for whatever tiles people individually contribute to the mosaic. give me a fucking break. :rolleyes:

didn’t say that there was, rather I stated that in western secular culture your face is not whereas your sexual organs are

um, no, what happened was that the extant culture was forcibly eradicated (native american/first nations) and was replaced with a western style culture. yes, french people wear berets and germans eat sauerkraut, but the cultural differences in europe are miniscule and de minimis when you look at things on a large scale.

edit: but i’ll turn it on you: do you really think western culture circa 1776 was and is really that much different from our culture today? sure, our culture today is “larger” so there’s more of it (and separating out technology-driven cultural changes from immigration-driven cultural changes is hard, in any case) but the fundamentals of both cultures, the cores, would, in my opinion, be very similar.

no, i’m not saying western secular culture is better than islamic culture (excuse the gross lumping in here). what i am saying is that when you immigrate into a culture (instead of arriving en masse in the age of discovery and conquering) you are the one who should conform themselves to the extant culture. this isn’t to say that all people have to exactly conform to the prevailing cultural norms, but by-and-large they need to adapt.

do you think it would be acceptable for a hoard of Indian immigrants to start bathing and leaving their animals’ corpses in the St. Lawrence river?

do you think it would be acceptable for a Female to immigrate into Saudi Arabia and start walking around outdoors unescorted and with shorts?

do you not get the point? when you **voluntarily **immigrate, especially in a modern context (as opposed to your crappy analogy related to our shared immigrant past of a wholesale exchange of cultures when one group of people conquers another) the burden of change and adaptation should be on you.

Oh, it wasn’t? I thought this “bring down the sole bastion of [F]rench in North America” business was you mocking what you imagine I’m thinking about. It’s not what I’m thinking about, and in any case I wouldn’t talk that way, so that’s why I asked you to cut the theatrical language. If you weren’t talking to me even obliquely then I’m sorry, but I can’t exactly tell what your point was.

Nobody says that. What we’re saying is that when you have an established culture in one place, you can’t expect to change it for one or even one thousand people. What you can do is try to accommodate them, but you have to look at the cost-benefit ratio, see if it’s feasible or reasonable. Of course the established culture may change over time: as I’ve told John Mace, a place where 50% of women wear niqab would have different conventional rules regarding identification. (I do believe my culture is probably in many ways better than one in which 50% of women wear niqab, but it’s not up to me to tell them, and mine isn’t perfect anyway either. Let he who is without sin, and all that.)

I will say, though, that it’s considered good form, when you’re a guest somewhere, to try to do the best you can to follow the stated or unstated rules of the place. Good hosts are accommodating, but good guests compromise as well.

This does seem reasonable to me, yes. But it could very well depend. A very small place may simply not have access to a woman photographer.

Yeah, I didn’t catch up on that comment by BigT, but it is quite inaccurate. “We don’t have a single one culture, we have a mosaic” is something people tell each other to try to sound more enlightened. It doesn’t work, and it’s not true anyway.

The natives definitely weren’t treated well, but “forcibly eradicated” is still very much a simplification of what happened.

just to put it out there, i’m not a fan of your death-by-1000-paper-cuts, cost/benefit approach to solving this. there are many many things in culture that are trivially easy to dispense with/modify and, each one by themselves don’t seem like a big deal, but will add up to large chunks of a given culture.

All I’m saying is, if it’s possible to accommodate someone without it being too much of a pain, it probably should be done.

Example? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

Huh? Are you trying to claim that earlier emigrants to existing societies didn’t have to change at all to match their new environments?

Sure, societies themselves change in response to new waves of immigrants, too. But it’s silly to argue that immigrants shouldn’t have to change AT ALL to fit in with their new societies.

Of course not, and likewise there’s no logical reason for vehicles to drive on the right side of the road rather than the left. However, it’s useful for a society to have a shared convention about which side to drive on, to avoid collisions.

Likewise, it’s useful for a society to have shared conventions about which body parts get covered in public. We shouldn’t decide that the majority culture automatically trumps immigrant cultures when it comes to clothing conventions, but neither should we say that immigrant cultures are automatically entitled to follow their own conventions when they conflict with the majority culture’s, not even when their conventions have a religious basis.

Well, this thing for one. I don’t think she should be accommodated.

Yes, the cost of accommodation is low, and the ostensible benefit is great (she gets to feel happy and some people get to pat themselves on the back for being so progressive). so unless you count the cost to society of having these tiny “paper cut” accommodations made, she’ll get accommodated. then it’s something else (i can’t really say because i can’t catalog minute points of culture right now) that, on its face is easy to accommodate and makes the aggrieved party feel great. so you change that. and so on and so forth.

I don’t think it necessarily has to be a slippery slope, though: we can establish distinctions of principle that would accommodate some things and not others. For instance, there’s my proposed accommodation test back in post #9:

I don’t think it’s a good test because then you’re just begging for various groups to enclave themselves. There needs to be some impetus for adaptation.

And it’s not slippery slope - I’m not suggesting that accommodating her choice of the photographer’s gender will eventually lead to the implementation of sharia law in Quebec. Rather I’m suggesting that making many small accommodations will have a noticeable effect on the culture as a good part of culture is made of of small, minute, intangible things.

Yeah, but I think we’ve already got enough impetus available in the positive aspects of the majority culture—specifically, greater liberty and autonomy—that spontaneously attract many, many immigrants from more repressive cultures.

I don’t agree with some other posters here that the influences in favor of cultural adaptation should be all carrot and no stick, but I think there’s plenty of carrot out there.

Perhaps. Maybe she should be told that in Western societies, we believe that women wearing a face-covering veil and only being allowed to remove it with other women or male family members is a backward custom, it goes against the very concept of equality between men and women, and we’re not going to stand for that. Your opinion is very common as well: I’ve read many comments about this issue and the one with the student, and a lot of them mention that Quebec is a secular society where equality of the sexes is a paramount value, so people going around with face veils and expecting to only deal with women just cannot be tolerated. I’ve also mentioned to KarlGauss our thoughts about laïcité and fear of religion once again taking a stronghold in the public or even governmental stage. I do have sympathy for this point of view, but refer yourself to [post=12235049]Muffin’s post[/post]:

In other words, what will happen if we tell her that her mode of dress itself is something we cannot accept in public? I can’t see any good coming from it.

Where do you think this would lead us? I’m with Kimstu, I don’t think this will lead to any major change in culture. There just isn’t a critical mass of niqabis in Quebec in the first place. (Many people with hairscarves, yes, but full-face veils isn’t something I see very often, if at all.)

ETA: and as for the laws against veils in France (is it in public, or only when working as government employees?), what I wonder is how you enforce it. Would it be legal for me (an atheist male) to wear a niqab because there clearly isn’t a religious value attached to it?

I just really don’t see the stick (or carrot) at all, though.

With the exception of refugees from war-torn areas or people fleeing from genuine totalitarian autocracies, I don’t think people immigrate for the political/social changes, frankly. It’s all a money proposition for them. Many see the immigrant through some rose-colored lenses that were sold with the propaganda of western exceptionalism: they’re coming to America (or Canada) because they love freedom and they love our open society. Which I think is a load of horseshit - especially if you are a member of a majority in a society, and you’re immigrating into a minority position, odds are you’re doing it for money.

(editing: I mean, isn’t it even prima facie that they’re not immigrating for the liberty and autonomy benefits when they seek to import, wholesale, the culture they came from?)

I’m not suggesting that the “slow cultural shifts” will come exclusively from niquabis, though. If there’s no generalized expectation of adaptation in a given society, you’ll get that pressure from 360 degrees.