Skirting the Issue

Sort of building on what I wrote yesterday… in the film they discussed the Hijab and Niqab, and what a shame it was that women were forced to wear them… well, it seems that in France they have the opposite problem.

They’ve banned religious garments or accessories in public schools. Sort of like the proposed law in Quebec a couple years ago, but extended even further. And the latest development is even more restrictive. A teenager was sent home from school for wearing a skirt. It seems that ankle-length skirts are too religious for French public schools?

Certainly when I see that type of skirt I assume it’s a religious thing… I’ve been known to call them “Mormon Skirts” because that’s my first assumption, rather than Muslim, but the basics are the same.

But why ban them? It seems totalitarian. Well, it is totalitarian. I'm not a big fan of slippery slope arguments, but banning skirts is an awful long way down some kind of slope.

This mentality seems to crop up a lot among anti-muslim activists. The idea seems to be that since women face so much societal pressure to wear the hijab, they need to be handed a convenient excuse not to... that they need to be able to tell their oppressors “I can’t wear that, it’s illegal”. When I met Maryam Namazie (Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain) while the Quebec law was still being proposed, she made that suggestion. My response at the time was that I would prefer to be on the side that’s not telling women what they have to wear… and that if there is no such side, perhaps we should make one. I don’t think the intervening years have given any cause to change that position.

There are women who want to wear religious garb. Really, there are! It seems ludicrous but those are the facts. There are also women who wear headscarves because they are cold and skirts because they are dancing and ornate robes because they are at the Renaissance festival. It does no good to single out religion as the one reason not to do those things.

The recent ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada shines some light on this... they ruled that secular is different from explicitly atheist. Removing prayers from city councils was a secular decision. Removing prayers but allowing atheist invocations would not be secular, because it's picking a side. I'm not sure that it precisely matches the dictionary definition, but it's at least fair and workable.

If you deny women their freedom to choose, then you are oppressing them just as much as the mullahs. At least as far as dress codes are concerned.