By Steve Evans

You read it here first folks: I am against France’s ban of burqas. I cringed a little bit when I read about it last week, but recovered when I read about a poll that says 2/3 of Americans are against a burqa ban.

By now I’m sure many readers are asking, “WTF is this crap doing on a blog that proclaims to uphold common sense?” And I will say, “you must read into my subject line to understand the true purpose of this article.” I am not proclaiming that burqas are good things – they are in fact oppressive, morally repugnant pieces of clothing that showcase the backwards traditions of the fundamentalist societies that impose them on women. These traditions are fed by a fundamentalist reading of Islam that calls for the subjugation of women. This is the end game for Islamic fundamentalists – it isn’t just that women should be seen and not heard, it’s that women shouldn’t even be seen. So the men of these societies force women behind the veil, literally and figuratively. This practice has to stop, and the sooner the better. Am I against the idea of wearing burqas? You bet I am.

The imposition of these “values” into Western society, and in the United States in particular (for it is my home), must indeed be fought. However, the fight must come via social pressure for men and the empowerment of women, not by government mandate. I believe this sentiment is shared by most or all of the respondents to the Pew poll, cited in the above link, who are against a burqa ban. This is because we recognize that government-imposed burqa bans are an improper regulation of religious freedom, despicable as that particular freedom may be. We recognize that there is a better way to handle the problem.

Control of Religion is the Goal, Not Liberty

This ban isn’t so much for liberating or equalizing women, as the French government claims, as it is control over religious practice. Don’t take my word for it. CNN reports as much:

However, a 2004 law in France bans the wearing or displaying of overt religious symbols in schools — including the wearing of headscarves by schoolgirls.

Overt religious symbols…like, say, Christian crosses? Or Jewish kippahs?  Yes, actually. A 2004 law vaguely banned “ostensibly” religious symbols in schools, which the administration of then-President Jacques Chirac defined as including both those things, as well as Muslim headscarves.

A history lesson of France’s religious-secular struggle is somewhat beyond the scope of this article. However, the reader’s digest version is that, in reaction to centuries of control by the Catholic Church, the French Republic, since 1789, has kept the Church, and increasingly more and more religious practices, under tight state regulation. The 2004 law, and now the burqa ban, is just another step in the French government’s aim to eliminate religion from the public square.

The 2004 law was somewhat easy to argue for because, after all, we can’t have the education of the children disrupted, right? The 2010 burqa ban is even easier to argue for, because no one wants to see women subjugated, right? Right? Add to that the poor integration of the Muslim community into French society, and you have the perfect mixture of crises to successfully argue that government action is needed. Is this sounding familiar to anyone? It should, because we all know that Leftists in the United States use both crisis and the need for government-legislated social justice as arguments for laws that suppress all kinds of freedoms in the United States, including freedom of expression. The burqa is not freedom of expression, but the French government is using the social justice argument to ban it.

That is why it’s astounding to me how many American conservatives seem to be, at best, ambivalent about this law. The French government is using some of the same tactics that they themselves would call foul on if it were Leftists doing it, and rightly so. But, because these laws of control over religion are against Islamic fundamentalism, that makes it okay. Or, maybe not okay, but not enough of an issue to speak out against.

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