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An important note along these lines: the fine for women in the French law is small, to the tune of ~150 EUR, plus counseling. The fine for fathers or husbands who force their daughters or wives to wear headcoverings is up to a cool 60,000 EUR.
Which strikes me as appropriate, but the problem would be the difficulty of prosecuting the latter provision.
And it's not about egalitarianism either. The ban exists solely to force assimilation. The statement it makes is about making part of their population not be different. It's a punishment for not being French enough. Which also is going to leave some psychological issues. You're not making people's lives better, just changing the source of shame.
I mean, it's certainly possible that this sort of thing is going on all the time. But:
a) I don't see how banning burqas solves the problem;
b) Wouldn't we have heard something about it?
c) If the problem is that Muslim men are raping and beating women for misbehaving, why is punishing the women the proposed solution?
Most of what I know of the situation comes from things like NPR, which has had a number of women on who were against the ban because it gets the state involved in their religion. This is, to me, almost always the wrong move. Sometimes the state will have to bite the bullet and get involved in this sort of thing, for instance in child abuse cases or with absurdly weird Scientology stuff or something like that, but for wearing a certain type of clothing? I don't think the threshold has been met.
How is any of that different from a shirt? Would you support legislation forcing all women to go topless?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/world/europe/14burqa.html?_r=1 How does banning something that 0.04 percent of the Muslim population wears going to do anything?
Our species has evolved highly expressive facial muscles for a reason. Covering someone's face at least partially cuts them off from the rest of the world.
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
This feels like fining the victim if the given reason is to believed. If wearing one of these things is oppressive to women why the hell are we fining the woman wearing one at all?
It would be like if during the hey day of the civil rights movement we fined every black person who road at the back of the bus or used segregated facilities.
By all means go after the people who force this on women, but its no ones business if they choose to wear it of their own will, and its certainly fucked up to fine them for it either way.
I would hope that is the reasoning, at least in part.
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
That doesn't seem very palatable.
What the French government could have / should have done is given vocal support to the muslim women being pressured into or otherwise forced to wear clothing that they do not wish to wear and made a case against the kind of supernatural nonsense underlying the issue. But governments in general are reluctant to do that for fear of offending their constituency.
Again, I don't see what a ban accomplishes. Neo-Nazis & Klansmen aren't going to disappear just because you made it illegal for them to distribute their pamphlets - you're only hurting public knowledge. Personally, I want to know who the racists lunatics are, so I say let them spill out their hatred to their heart's content (especially in today's age, where the ability to reproduce and playback hateful or insane rhetoric to the horror of the viewer or listener has become so easy).
At the same time, even if something has a lasting effect on you psychologically, that doesn't imply that there's a compelling governmental interest in banning it. Verbal abuse may hurt somebody's self-esteem; but the social damage done to free speech in criminalizing it would far outweigh the benefits of sparing some people from getting their feelings hurt. A sexual partner cheating on me would certainly hurt me psychologically and render intimacy and trust more difficult in future relationships; but we don't really want the government regulating who you may or may not have sex with.
The issue here is that the cure can easily be worse than the disease. To solve the problem, we'd have to identify whether burqa-wearing is itself harmful. I recognize that it can be a marker of sexual subjugation, but banning the marker doesn't necessarily get to the root of the problem. Meanwhile, even if we accept the assumption that only a minority of burqa-wearing women came to the decision to wear a burqa out of an empowered mindset, by banning burqas we've infringed on that empowered minority's freedom while doing very little to stop the victimization of the subjugated majority... (not to mention any other legitimate face-coverings people may want to wear).
(That assumption, BTW, is one that I think should be made with care. It feels very Orientalist to me. I don't want to sit around impotently in a gooey puddle of weak-minded cultural relativism, but neither do I want to jump to conclusions about populations for which I have no direct empirical data.)
Europe has been sliding into extremely anti muslim as the years go on. Didn't some country ban minerrettes or something ridiculous? This is nothing more than a blatant fuck you to muslims couched in "social equality". Par for the course for the current french government.
Except that it won't play out that way. What happens is that the women is forced to remain home, completely cutting her off from the world. If the point of the fine is give an excuse then it's a poorly thought out point.
Two things with this part actually.
1) We don't generally hold that people have religious freedom because of the 1st amendment, but that people have religious freedom and the 1st amendment exists to make sure the government respects that. It strikes me as wrong to think that our notions of religious freedom don't apply to people not under the 1st amendment.
2) No one thinks this means the end of religious freedom in France, but that's really just a statement to make people who object to the law look like chicken little screaming the sky is falling.
Number I heard on NPR was I believe 1200 women.
It strikes me as a hamfisted use of government power to combat a problem that doesn't really exist, and I oppose it on those grounds alone.
Kind of like Voter ID laws here in the States.
Further alienating the immigrant culture by prohibiting one of their common practices (without a very compelling objective reason to do so) is counterproductive.
So yea, it doesn't solve anything or improve anyone's situation, no point to it.
This. If the goal really was to prevent abuse then this is how you do it. But this isn't the goal of the ban.
It's kind of a burn the village to save it thing, and there are a good number of people in France that are more than happy to burn this particular village.
With little or no concern as to whether there's any actual saving going on.
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
So it's the same in one way? Is it the same in any other ways?
Because I sure as hell don't believe that outlawing a piece of clothing that is basically misogynistic, religious oppression and forcing it on people are the same thing in any meaningful way.
I mean sure it's a restriction on clothing but what the hell does that matter? We put restrictions on that shit all the time.
Not that you're going to make a broad statement about a religion or anything.
Backward religion is sort of redundant, dontcha think? Catholicism, Judaism...the religions that grew out of the middle east can all be viewed in light of their most radical supporters and judged accordingly.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Islam itself is no more backward than Christianity or Jewish faith. It's the practioners who are backward.
Mmmmm....toasty.
Christianity is no better, it's just less misogynistic because society has forced it to be and people pick and chose parts of the bible they like and ignore the others.
Edit: To further clarify, Islam's holy book isn't any worse than any of the others. In fact afaik the Burka isn't even in there but it has become a thing with the faithful, the world would be better served with it being gone, but this law doesn't actually do that so it's moot.
Most people do the same with Islam, to be fair.
However, this law is rediculous - if the French society has decided that burqas are universally abusive and intent is to punish men for abusing women by forcing them to wear burqas, then punish the men who force women to wear burqas, not the women for being abused. And if the simple act of wearing a burqa is not enough to prove abuse, then don't punish women across the board just for wearing one.
Also, a powerful legal entity telling a vulnerable population what to do or face the consequences because they know better what's Good For You is not 'empowerment'; it's the exact opposite.
I think it's basically misogynistic when we take it upon ourselves to decide for women what they may and may not do with themselves.
I'm not sure what it is you think you're arguing, here. It is disagreeable when we decide that women must do something, and it is equally disagreeable to decide they must not. If women are being forced to do something they do not wish to do, fining those women for doing it does not address the actual problem (women being coerced into doing something), it merely victimizes the victimized while infringing on the right of women who are not being coerced to make decisions about themselves and what they will and will not do.
I am not aware of any other restrictions that we "put on that shit all the time" that are at all equivalent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
Assuming 200k in the USA, that comes out to about 0.06 percent of the US population.
The day a major world religion starts forcing their women to wear sombreros if they don't want to be raped or stoned to death, and the sombrero becomes a way of preventing a woman from functioning in modern society, I'll start putting that on the same level as a burqa, too.
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you here, other than I think the international community should spend less time disapproving of France, and more time disapproving of Saudi Arabia.
I think I've done a poor job of expressing myself, here: I don't think there should be a burqa ban, but I don't think burqas are a good thing at all. I think burqas are an incredibly evil thing. But the reaction I got when I posted in chat wasn't like "oh, yeah, they probably shouldn't do that, it's a violation of religious freedom." I was literally called a racist and a Fox News talking head. And I didn't even say it was a good thing, I just said I didn't really have that much of a problem with it, and saw it as pretty much a wash (the gain in egalitarianism making up for the loss in religious freedom).
It's not that I don't think this is a violation of free speech (because it totally is); I just don't see it as a violation on the level of banning the Koran, it's a violation on the level of banning the swastika or cross-burning.
On the 'fining victims' point - since I did introduce the point, I do wish to emphasize that I recognize that trying to prevent the enforcers of this particular social pressure from acting is likely hopeless. KalTorak made the point here -
Which brings me back to the top quote - insofar as the point is to engineer social change, it would yes fuck over people who are already victims and fail to prosecute a lot of people who are at fault, and there is little that can be improved upon that - the goal should be to engineer the change quickly, establish a new status quo, and then lift the restriction.
I can, but I don't want to mess up the thread with more strained analogies.
We can do the cost:benefits analysis for other areas where sexism and gender roles might lead us to legislate one way or another (prostitution, polygamy, BDSM, pornography, etc.). Each of these areas involve a situation where adults are doing something in their sexual relationships that is kind of weird and may be a marker for abuse. The basic calculus is the same: how much harm is actually being done, will the law prevent that harm, will the law cause other harm?
The difference is that genital mutilation is objectively harmful, while wearing a head covering is only harmful given certain assumptions about the marriages of those who wear them.
Edit: I'm going to do the annoying thing and quote myself because I was botped.
And if she feels forced to wear it due to the culture she lives in, will banning the burqa improve the culture? Or will the men whom she apparently feels bound to obey just tell her to stay home so that no one will see her? Probably the latter. Or she will go without out it in public but feel anxiety and stress--yes, experiencing psychological damage.
Some fundie Christian communities make all the women in their community wear dresses, yet I am 100% certain that banning dresses is not the appropriate response.
The whole thing reminds me of Japanese-Americans being jailed during WWII "for their own protection." Don't worry, you backwards brown-skinned Muslim people! France will save you from yourselves!
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Maybe if jews started putting gold stars on their clothes voluntarily as part of their faith....