Burqas, Niqabs and Hijabs

This is such a big issue that everyone seems to have an opinion about. What surprises me is that no one is willing to admit that it's a complicated issue with decent arguments on both sides. That's why I haven't written about it until now.
Coming to Philadelphia has given me a slightly better perspective because, living in West Philly, I am for the first time in a suburb where I can walk down the street and see masked women. Walking down the right street here there's a good chance of seeing a woman in a niqab; two or three if you walk past the mosque. I realise that it's not as confronting as I thought it might be but that might be because I'm a man and don't empathise with women in a visceral way (some feminists bristle at the sight of a veiled woman for fear that they could be subject to the same situation).

I think part of the reason the debate is all heat and no light is because it's all or nothing, for or against completely banning a practice that means a lot to certain people. At least that's how it's portrayed; there's certainly differences in degree between banning something in the streets vs government buildings vs government employees.
But when France banned all religious symbols from schools in 2004 it seemed like overkill. Headscarves, kippahs etc. don't interfere with a student's ability to learn and one would think that a mere symbol wouldn't start fights in schools. Certainly I can't think of anywhere in Australia where religious symbols would work as gang tags (because that would require that religion be more controversial than race, which is not something you wear). One could imagine a situation where a school is divided along religious lines, which would necessitate the banning of religious symbols. But until this actually happens, why would you deprive people of a little freedom of expression?
Of course I have a lot of respect for France's tradition of secularity but I don't think it needs to apply to every citizen. What it should apply to is agents of the state, so teachers and postal workers shouldn't be allowed to wear religious symbols.

The prominent public philosopher Martha Nussbaum has weighed into the debate. She considers it from an American legal perspective, demolishing each argument for banning the practice based on the legal notion of respect. Because she considers only American law, there is an inbuilt assumption that the state won't interfere unless absolutely necessary:

Furthermore, equal respect for persons is compatible, as I said, with limiting religious freedom in the case of a “compelling state interest.” In the snake-handler case, the interest was in public safety. Another government intervention that was right, in my view, was the judgment that Bob Jones University should lose its tax exemption for its ban on interracial dating (Bob Jones v. U. S., 461 U. S. 574 (1983). Here the Supreme Court agreed that the ban was part of that sect’s religion, and thus that the loss of tax-exempt status was a “substantial burden” on the exercise of that religion, but they said that society has a compelling interest in not cooperating with racism. Never has the government taken similar steps against the many Roman Catholic universities that restrict their presidencies to a priest, hence a male; but in my view they should all lose their tax exemptions for this reason.

When she considers the claim that only an outright ban can stop men from forcing their wives to cover up, her legal answer is that there are already laws to stop that. This seems to be one of the weaker points of her discussion. I don't know if she'd say the same thing about other laws targeting very specific forms of abuse, such as genital mutilation laws. It seems to me that a canny politician is missing an opportunity here to play both sides by introducing a bill that only bans the coercion of others into covering their faces. This should please feminists but you'd also get the right on side by making an example of the very small number of Muslim men living in Western countries who actually abuse their wives in this way.

Nussbaum discusses coercion of children in a reply to comments on the first article. I think her discussion of coercion recognises but refuses to say what the nub of the issue is. She would have the government ban only those practices that can be shown to be physically harmful and irreversible. Thus she thinks male circumcision ok because, although irreversible, she doesn't believe that it's harmful. But because burqas come off they can be imposed on children. Here's the problem: the first person to say to Nussbaum, 'What about the mental damage done?' will meet the instant rejoinder, 'You have no objective measure to decide what sort of indoctrination constitutes harm and what is merely enculturation.'
While I'd like to defend everyone's right to choose, I'm not enough of a cultural relativist to say that all or even most of those women who choose to cover their faces are making a free choice. Keeping one's face uncovered is the natural default position and making someone think that talking from behind a screen in preferable amounts to brainwashing. For the small number of women who actually make a free choice, I can't think of any explanation for wanting to hide that part of the body from everyone apart from some sort of pathological shyness. It's futile to fight brainwashing in the current generation but we can try to stop parents doing it to the next; pathological shyness is not a sin but should not be encouraged.

And when she discusses the Amish depriving their children of compulsory education, Nussbaum just cites legal precedent. Very unsatisfying as a moral argument but at least she acknowledges that this is tricky - 'The case is difficult, because the parents made a convincing case that work on the farm, at that crucial age, was a key part of their community-based religion — and yet education opens up so many exit opportunities that the denial even of those two years may unreasonably limit children’s future choices.'
However, I don't think it's as difficult as she makes it seem: children are not their parents' chattels so it doesn't much matter that the practice is a way to get their children to follow in their footsteps. All that matters is that the children have a choice

Why can no one see that people on different ends of the political spectrum can start with different principles but come up with the same answer? It's like they want to cut off their noses to spite their faces. As much as I hate Fred Nile, I agree with his anti-tobacco stance and if I were a parliamentarian and he introduced a workable bill, I'd vote for it. Closer to the main point, the British Nationalist Party has a good stance against animal cruelty. This is probably just a way to annoy Muslims and Jews by banning Halal and Kosher slaughter but the BNP's bad motives are not reason enough to oppose this sort of legislation. Sure, when nasty people support something, that might make you take a look, but in the end the only criterion should be whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

Maybe this sort of public declaration from Muslims will make liberals realise that they're supporting the same end for very different reasons:

Women did not wear Islamic dress out of freedom of choice, Fautmeh Ardati told the Lakemba rally.
''Because to use freedom of choice as a justification, then we are also accepting of women who undress out of this same freedom of choice, and we can never do this as Muslim women. We dress like this because it is the command of Allah, not any man.''

Unlike liberals, progressives might claim that they're just using different language to talk about the same thing, ie pluralism rather than mere liberty but that's going to be hard to argue. And the end of the article undermines the plausibility even further -- 'One woman wearing a burqa said she would have to ask her husband before speaking to the Herald. When asked if she needed her husband's permission to speak, she said: ''We are allowed but we choose not to.'''