Veiling, Burqas and Western Feminism

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Martina

i just saw this. It's by a French politician, trying to justify to Americans why they feel the need to outlaw veils that cover the face. i do not believe it for a moment. It is cultural. And i sympathize with that. i do. But still.

You know that London is the city most covered by video surveillance in the world. i cannot believe that that is acceptable to them, but it is. i work in a high crime area. i have been the victim of crimes. But this stuff just brings out the unreconstructed civil libertarian in me.

There's an article in this week's Nation, i think, by Katha Pollit -- about Berlin. They have had some form of public health insurance since the late 19th Century. And so on. i too envy a lot of the public institutions that some European countries have. But i would not give up the right to dress and worship as i please for any of them. Maybe that is a privileged person speaking, one who has usually had health insurance.

i am not jingoistic about the U.S., but the day will never come in this country when it is illegal to wear the veil. It's impossible to imagine. And i am very happy to come from THAT tradition. There definitely are things about the U.S. that i like, and this is one of them. That feeling IN ME that, by god, the day they pass a law like that, i will be on the streets to defend a practice i find personally abhorrent. And i know lots of people -- conservative and liberal -- who would feel the same.

Interesting that this discussion is happening now. I'm currently listening to an audiobook recording of "The Future of Liberalism" by Alan Wolfe. In the book he calls liberals back to a form of 'classical' liberalism with a focus on individual rights. At present, I'm at the chapter where he talks about immigration, multiculturalism and religious pluralism and he draws a distinct contrast between the American way of handling these issues and the European way.

The American way of dealing with these issues is to err on the side of the individual--so if someone wants to wear the veil here, there should be no law prohibiting it nor should that person have to fear social sanction regardless of their reasons for wearing the veil. In Europe the tendency is to err on the side of social cohesion--thus France's ban on the veil or the Dutch ban on minarets, etc. One interesting thing that the author points out is that Americans have a very *different* view of immigration than most Europeans because while both America and Europe have a liberal intellectual tradition, the latter does *not* have a body of liberal thought applied to the question of immigration while Americans do.


Cheers
Aj