Ban on Public Burqas

[No Limit]

What other clothing are you willing to ban Solaris? We would all probably agree that women dress like whores because of the pressure society puts on them to look like whores. Maybe we should set up some laws to address that.

 

[Solaris]

What other clothing are you willing to ban Solaris? We would all probably agree that women dress like whores because of the pressure society puts on them to look like whores. Maybe we should set up some laws to address that.

In the UK clothing is already banned in many situations. Political uniforms are illegal, you cannot dress to impersonate an official of authority. I'm sure in many Western countries it would be illegal to walk around with a Swastika on your Tshirt, or some offensive symbol on your shoulder.

The Burka represents the oppression and submission of women. If our society reaches a point where all Muslim women can speak English, are not abused and as free and independent as anyone else, then yes allow the Burka.

However, by banning it, we are restricting the ability of a man to force his wife to wear it, not the reverse.

 

[CptStern]

I've met a ton of Muslim women, probably more than you.

However, what have two random women at your work got to do with it, we are talking specifically about the Burka.

Burka=/=head scarf

yes and how many of the muslim women you have met have told you personally that they were forced into wearing it?

also the coworker who wears the hijab has a sister who wears a burka. it was her choice. the point is that it's more of a choice than you think. sure it's forced on some people whether passively (culturally) or actively (parental) however you cant discount that many do choose to wear it. I mean it's absolutely no different than a orthodox jewish woman wearing a wig or head scarf in public or a man wearing a yarmulke; it can be forced or by choice, you cant make a blanket statement and expect it to go unchallenged especially since it's based on personal experience

 

[Druckles]

probably more than you.

That's hard to say.

 

[CptStern]

Druckles should know because we're like this

whereas Solaris and I are more like this

 

[No Limit]

In the UK clothing is already banned in many situations. Political uniforms are illegal, you cannot dress to impersonate an official of authority. I'm sure in many Western countries it would be illegal to walk around with a Swastika on your Tshirt, or some offensive symbol on your shoulder.

The Burka represents the oppression and submission of women. If our society reaches a point where all Muslim women can speak English, are not abused and as free and independent as anyone else, then yes allow the Burka.

However, by banning it, we are restricting the ability of a man to force his wife to wear it, not the reverse.

Well whats great about america is we have this thing called freedom of speech. So pretty much everything you mentioned aside from impersonating a police officer is legal here. And why shouldn't it be?

Skimpy outfits represent women being objectified. Plenty of christians hate it. And you can argue women dress this way not because they want to but because there is pressure from society for them to dress that way. So should we ban that? I don't see how the logic is any different from the argument you are making.

 

[Solaris]

There's a difference between 'pressure from society' and 'if you dont wear this you cant leave the house'.

 

[Druckles]

And that doesn't happen over here?

 

[CptStern]

There's a difference between 'pressure from society' and 'if you dont wear this you cant leave the house'.

but this never ever happens:

"if you wear this you cant leave the house"

whether it's parents, a husband, a sibling or whatever people have been trying to make people conform to what they think is ok for milineum. I dont see you ranting about the amish or orthodox jews. it's just muslims who are an affront to your sensibilities. everyone else gets a free pass. why? ...who knows! they're not brown?

 

[Sulkdodds]

There's a difference between 'pressure from society' and 'if you dont wear this you cant leave the house'.

How do you detect this? How do you stop this? Will banning the burqa improve these women's lives? Will it chastise this postulated legion of abusive husbands into happy and respectful companionship? Or will it send a lovely message to enlightened liberals about how our society is standing up to oppression, while liberating nobody and limiting the rights of the many, many women who wear the stupid bloody thing of their own free will? Let's note that the law already extends at least some protection to women who want, should they have the desire and the courage, to report abuse, to leave home, or to divorce their husbands.

It would be nice to 'send a message' but message-sending can't be allowed to take precedence over an actual concern for actual people's actual lives. Banning the burqa is obviously stupid unless all other face coverings are banned (which they shouldn't be), so the real question is whether any religious protection should be extended to situations where a covering would normally be prohibited for practical reasons: courtrooms, banks, and, more problematically, schools. In the latter two cases it's a private choice, but if a school privately chooses to suspend a teacher who demands to wear a burqa, should that teacher be able to sue them for discrimination?

I instinctively lean towards 'no' because I value secular ethics and principles above religious ones; naturally I think the education of thirty children is more important than the bullshit exclusionary mystical antifeminist 'dignity' of one adult woman At the same time, religion, silly as it is, can be very important to people, and I don't think a cold and abstract approach to how people feel is going to go very far towards preserving their liberty. In these cases, however, we should examine how necessary it really is that the burqa be removed. A bank? Who cares, bombs or guns could be hidden under other garments and if anything a burqa will only put staff on watchful edge. A courtroom? Possibly, but consider how much of "confrontation" is really about knowing the identity of your accuser. A woman wearing a burqa will not ordinarily be recognisable out on the street - mightn't it be enough to know her name, see her details? If there's worry about impersonation, perhaps elected officials can privately verify her identity and the accused privately see her face without it being displayed to the whole courtroom.

The best solution might be to extend religious protection laws to the burqa with a conditional clause (perhaps one that should be present for all religious items): the employer has a right to ask employees to remove or restrain religious items if they are prepared to show, in court, that it was necessary for the performance of their duties.

 

[Solaris]

I agree with you somewhat Skullduggerdudds, however all the problems Burkas bring up with regards to schools, banks, work places etc it would be better if we just banned them.

I myself would never be able to build any kind of relationship with a women in a Burka, they are repulsive and offensive to me. I would probably give the woman the number for a local womens refuge and then refuse to speak to her. To me the Burka says one of two things:

1. I am an abused women who's jealous and insecure husband commands me to wear this

or

2. I think you, as a man, are incapable of acting gentlemanly after seeing the flesh of a woman, you are an animal.

The first one saddens me, the second one offends me. The Burka is such a horrid symbol I don't want to live in a society where it exists. There are extremely religious countries in the world for Muslim women who want to wear Burkas, why not move there? Or else adopt values and a lifestyle that allows you to intergrate with the diverse population we have in the UK.

 

[CptStern]

have you seriously never met someone from a culture other than your own? foreigners have strange customs. let's shun them because of it. you're being just as close minded as the people you think you're above

 

[Solaris]

have you seriously never met someone from a culture other than your own? foreigners have strange customs. let's shun them because of it. you're being just as close minded as the people you think you're above

I'm not a cultural relativist. I believe my home culture is superior to one which says women must cover themselves totally when in public and may not touch another man, ever.

They're welcome to live like that if they want, but if an employer says its not acceptable then he should be allowed to say that.

You say its mostly consensual for women but it seems maybe 500 women a year are victims of female circumcision:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5913979.ece

**** any culture that says it's okay, I don't see much of a difference between that and the Burka, they are both about female repression.

 

[Sulkdodds]

He's not just objecting to the existence of a foreign custom but to its specifically repulsive character.

Solaris: I myself would never be able to build any kind of relationship with someone who wore a T-shirt that said "you laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same." I don't know if your repulsion is grounds to restrict the choices of others. Wearing a cross says "I believe myself and all other humans subjected to an inveitable bastard centre of the universe in whose eyes we are only dust, His dust" but that is going to have to be, in some way, okay by me.

Similarly: all the problems that a free press brings up with privacy, grieving mothers, trivialisation of politics and genuine national security (I'll believe it when I see it) would be solved easily if we just banned it. It is not the job of a government to take the easiest route and "solving problems easily" is a false economy. Solve one 'problem' (schools and burqas) and have fun dealing with all the new ones that crop up, not only from the Muslim community but from the dangerous precedents created.

And while I don't want to get into a wider debate about how our society should be because I've grounded my argument so specifically in the practical removal or extension of liberties, I have to say that you're full of shit. Even if Britain should not be a country where the foremost cultural principle is that of cultural tolerance - even if a "diverse population" can just be capped off when it gets a little too diverse for you - even if it's not healthy for people to be confronted every day with something that is strange to them, and dangerous and infantilising to try and protect them - even if, you can't possibly believe that changing the law would do a damn thing to strengthen our 'shared, common, civilised' (exclusionary, savage, myopic, rife-with-contradictions-from-the-get-go) 'culture'. The soft forces of social being - disrespect, fear, ostracisation - will erect a pretty strong divide between us and them without the government having to step in and pick the side that has more votes. Abolishing the burqa - or coming to terms with it - is a task for citizens, writers, artists, feminists, philosophers, and all ordinary people who fit into any one of those categories. It is not for the law.

 

[CptStern]

I'm not a cultural relativist. I believe my home culture is superior to one which says women must cover themselves totally when in public and may not touch another man, ever.

again you're generalising. didnt I just give you an example of a muslim woman who wears no covering whatsoever?

They're welcome to live like that if they want, but if an employer says its not acceptable then he should be allowed to say that.

You say its mostly consensual for women but it seems maybe 500 women a year are victims of female circumcision:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5913979.ece

first of all I didnt say "its mostly consensual". you just didnt leave any room for it being consentual at all. you're changing what I said and what you said for the sake of strengthening a non existing point. Second you're equating wearing a hijab with female circumcision. considering there are muslims worldwide number in the billions and seeing as how roughly half of those are women this couldnt be the norm because you yourself said there were maybe 500 victems world wide per year. perhaps for 100% of those 500 women it wasnt their choice however you cant extrapolate that to mean it's not by choice for the other 750,000,000 muslims

**** any culture that says it's okay, I don't see much of a difference between that and the Burka, they are both about female repression.

lol that's equvilent of saying the pushup bra is equvilent to forced female circumcision. the pushup bra is no different in that's it's a societal marker of gender just like the burka; in that sense it's just as repressive. again there are other groups in your neck of the woods that do the same thing yet you seem to be ok with it

 

[Sulkdodds]

I would be in favour of push-up bras if there were push-up boxers.

 

[Interface]

freedom for the sake of freedom doesn't work in the world we live in

I think I really need some elaboration on this point.

 

[Tyguy]

The soft forces of social being - disrespect, fear, ostracisation - will erect a pretty strong divide between us and them without the government having to step in and pick the side that has more votes. Abolishing the burqa - or coming to terms with it - is a task for citizens, writers, artists, feminists, philosophers, and all ordinary people who fit into any one of those categories. It is not for the law.

This.

I think it's important to ask oneself whether this type of ban has an ulterior motive, which of course it does. It's sad to know that most of these women are treated so poorly but creating litigation to ban an article of clothing is wrong, especially since it could not be enforced even to a degree in which it has even the slightest impact on cultural progress.

This is a huge issue for the feminist movement but good luck waiting for soccer moms with SUV's and fake tits to take interest in the muslim world. In my experience the feminists, at least in the US, are concerned with the US and everybody else can screw.

 

[unozero]

I think I really need some elaboration on this point.

I'm about to go out for Lunch with family I'll elaborate on that point in a few hours.

 

[Cancer]

I am not a fan of burqas, they get in the way if women' natural beauty. Even worse are the ones that cover the face and only have the eye exposed. Eh, as humans and relatives to the apes, we are from birth capable of reading emotions in peoples faces. Smile, good; frown, sad. So, do tell me how I am suppose to "read" the facial expressions of someone who I can only see the eyes of.

That is my only issue about burqas, and all of the variations of it, they are just masking the actual person's appearance. I, as a straight man find it annoying. I appreciate the facial expressions, bodies, etc. of a woman. Heck, go to any art museum and see all the anal detail that is focus in the creation of sculptures and paintings that embrace the woman's body. The curves, hips, chest, and face.

Mona Lisa, the whole focus of the art is the damn face and more specifically the facial expression.

Who the heck thought it was a swell idea to cover up something like that?! Just ridiculous...

 

[VirusType2]

Burqa ban is completely wrong and is the same as those countries in the middle east that have banned Bibles, etc.

Lmao. The burqa has nothing to do with religion.

I would be in favour of push-up bras if there were push-up boxers.

lol

 

[Stigmata]

It doesn't have "nothing to do" with religion, they're just both part-and-parcel of the larger issue of massive power imbalances in social structures (almost always in favour of males), which are overtly worse in large non-Western cultures.

 

[VirusType2]

I support a ban on religion.

 

[Stigmata]

I support a ban on power structures.

Wait, no. Religion. Definitely religion.

 

[Banana]

The nationalist party here in Denmark are trying to ban burqas as well, which is totally ridiculous as there are only six women that wear burqas here on a regular basis.

I, personally, finds it uncomfortable to look at people who cover themselves entirely, but of course you should be allowed to.

 

[Llama]

They're pushing to do this in the UK, which I find seriously ironic.

Ive seen alot of the world, experienced many cultures, met many amazing people, and I can safely say through my experience that my fellow British people are easily the most racist people on the planet.

The irony here is almost poetic.