Several European politicians recently have talked about the problems burqas pose to civil interaction and society as we know it. The Dutch are the first that I have seen proposing so global a ban though.[1] They want to ban them in all public places.
I do not like this idea at all. I sympathize with the lawmakers, the extreme level of anonymity provided to the wearer by a burqa must propose unique challenges to law enforcement among other things. This is not, cannot be, the right solution though. The state should not be defining what is an acceptable level of modesty for a person to attempt to maintain. For as I understand it, modesty is precisely what is at stake here from the Islamic point of view. They believe, I am told, that the woman must cover herself so completely because her beauty would cause men to look at her lustfully. In Catholic terms then, that unless so extremely covered, she would be viewed as an object and not as a person.
I think that chain of logic flawed. I think it puts far too little responsibility on the man, grants too little reality to free will. That is neither here nor there though, the critical data point is not whether I believe it or no, but whether they believe it or no. Nor is it sufficient to say that many or most Muslim women do not choose to wear the full burqa. I will take the logic behind the law to its extreme to make the cause of my disagreement clear.
Suppose you had a society in which shirts were not normally worn. A small percentage of the population, say 5%, is made up of immigrants from a "western" civilization where shirts are commonly worn. Most of these people, including most of the women, are willing to go along with the societal norm and go topless. A few dozen women though feel that it offends their modesty, which they are religiously obligated to protect. Should that society pass a law banning shirts in public? Clearly they could, but I think they should not.
Though the headdress is overkill in our eyes, we should respect the religiously motivated practices of others wherever possible. We should be extremely reluctant to interfere, doing so only when the religion in question is actively destructive to society. We should be extremely reluctant to so classify, always being mindful that our own rubric might somewhere/someday be used to classify us.
Naturally there exist cases were tolerance is not possible. The Mayan or Incan religions, with their human sacrifices, could not be allowed to exist. Yet it is this sort of extreme alone that I propose be the bar for interference. Thus I have stated that I do not want to see government preventing the use of hallucinogens in religious worship, though I believe the religion in question false, and the use of hallucinogens both wrong and harmful.