To Burqa Or Not To Burqa

TW: You would be hard pressed to find someone more adamantly secular than me. But I find things like banning burqas counter-productive and destructive. The above cartoon frames the challenges of the state determining acceptable expressions of taste, morality and religion. A burqa to me is not an attractive expression of religion, taste or morality but that is me. In the U.S. we tend toward permitting individuals to make these decisions within limits of safety and certain moral constraints (i.e. prancing around nude in generally restricted).

If the state intervenes regardless of the grounds, it opens a pandora's box best left closed in my opinion, where does it stop? Furthermore, I suspect like most cultural bans, folks will only be motivated to embrace the use of the burqa as a protest if for no other reason.

From Economist:
"...Now Nicolas Sarkozy has sparked another by calling the burqa, a head-to-toe Islamic garment, “a sign of subjugation…of debasement” that is “not welcome on French territory”.

Mr Sarkozy’s comments came after a group of deputies, led by André Gerin, a Communist, had called for a parliamentary inquiry into the wearing of the burqa, with a view to a possible ban. This would mean in all public places, since it is already banned in state institutions under the 2004 law. The deputies called burqas “veritable walking prisons”.

France’s strict secularism, entrenched by law since 1905, keeps religion firmly out of the state sphere. There are no religious studies (let alone nativity plays) in state schools, nor may public workers sport the headscarf. The government denies that such policies constrain religious freedom or are especially aimed at Islam. France welcomes private Muslim schools. Mosque-building is widespread. The 2004 headscarf ban outlawed “conspicuous” religious symbols of all faiths. Yet there are growing worries about the spread of hard-line Islamism in the heavily Muslim banlieues.

...In fact, few women wear the full garment in France. But mayors of cities with big Muslim populations report a steady increase in numbers, due not to immigration but to its adoption by French-born women—often from North African countries where the burqa is not traditionally worn.

Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the official French Council of the Muslim Faith, has suggested that the inquiry would itself stigmatise Islam. A ban might be misunderstood abroad, and not only in the Muslim world. In his recent speech in Cairo, Barack Obama said that “it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practising religion as they see fit—for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.”

Not so, say many French politicians—including such prominent Muslims as Fadela Amara, the cities minister. The founder of a women’s-rights group, Ms Amara has called the burqa “a coffin that kills individual liberties”, and a sign of the “political exploitation of Islam”.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13925890