As an ex Muslim who hates Islam more than any other religion, I find the idea of banning the burqa, or any otherpiece of clothing, to be pretty reprehensible. Wearing the burqa doesn't harm anyone so why ban it?
Earlier in the thread, the user Bomb #20 brought up the idea that objecting to a burqa ban means you have to object to a minimum wage. (Sorry, I'm a newbie at this stuff so I don't know the proper procedure for quoting and all that.)
Hi, welcome to the forum, and congratulations on being independent-thinking enough -- and courageous enough -- to walk away from that police-state of the mind.
You can quote people by simply clicking the "Reply With Quote" button instead of the "Reply" button. Then you can delete part of the quoted text if it's long and you only want to quote a piece of it.
Alternately, you can cut-and-paste from the post you're quoting, and then you write [ quote = person's name ] in front and [ / quote ] at the end of the quoted text. And do it without all the space characters I put in there to keep the software from thinking I was writing a quote, as opposed to showing you how to do one.
Anyway, back to the topic. No, I'm not saying objecting to a burqa ban means you have to object to a minimum wage. People can object to whatever they want in whatever combinations they want. I'm saying that
if your argument for objecting to the burqa ban is that we have to respect people's decisions and the state has no right to tell people how to live their lives, well, that argument is an equally good argument against the minimum wage. So if you make that argument against a burqa ban but you aren't against the minimum wage, then either you really haven't thought through your opinions about other people's freedom, or else respecting people's decisions is just a rationalization and it isn't your real reason for objecting to the burqa ban.
But of course it's entirely consistent to object to a burqa ban but not object to the minimum wage
if you have a different argument for not banning the burqa. For instance, if you think it shouldn't be banned because it's necessary for female modesty, or it shouldn't be banned because that would be giving your political enemies a victory, those reasons are perfectly compatible with supporting the minimum wage.
But anyways, the reason why we can prohibit working for under the minimum wage is because it does hurt other people ( businesses start expecting people to work for less and many can't afford to work for that little.) Wearing the burqa doesnt.
But it does. It hurts others for exactly the same reason working for under the minimum wage hurts others. Men who are conservative and misogynistic and are in positions of power within Muslim families are likely to react to seeing a lot of Muslim women in burqas exactly the same way self-interested employers react to seeing a lot of unskilled workers working for $3.00 an hour -- they'll start expecting the people they have power over to do the same. A woman who wears a burqa as a fashion statement or because she doesn't like men looking at her is helping to create a cultural environment in which some other woman will be pressured into wearing one, every bit as much as a guy who takes a sub-minimum-wage job is helping create a cultural environment in which some other worker will be pressured into working as cheaply.
But you have to respect people's decisions to wear what they want (again, as long as it doesn't bring harm to anyone else.) Even if you think they're making the wrong decision or hurting themselves. Because otherwise you start banning people for smoking weed, or playing too many video games. All because "it's for their own good."
It is way, way too late to start banning people for their own good from doing things. We've been doing that for, well, pretty much forever. Heck, we even ban people from riding motorcycles without helmets when they're doing a great service for all the people on transplant waiting lists. Governments don't have to respect anything the public chooses not to make them respect. That's democracy.