And my contention is that burqas infringe on the rights of Muslim females to express themselves in any physical manner. I suppose this is where our opinions irreconcilably diverge though.
Yes, that seems to be the opinion of the vast majority of people, but it's still an opinion. You can't make laws based on your opinion.
Exactly.
Sometimes I wear a ski mask in the winter while I'm outside shoveling snow.
You can wear it but you can't wear it if you follow my meaning. You can wear a helmet, but you try going into a store with one on, they'll call the cops. You can wear the appropriate equipment for doing a task but you are expected to remove it outside of that task. So ski-masks on being worn into a bank will get you shot, regardless of how cold it was outside.
In Australia, is there no difference between public and private places? I ask because you keep referencing private areas, such as banks and gyms. In America, these privately owned places are allowed (for the most part) to set their own set of rules and standards. So, I have no problem with a bank or gas station saying that people must not shield their face while they are inside their private establishment, however I don't think the government should be setting these laws for public places like parks, streets, etc.
But to what extent are the French allowed to govern themselves based on their own cultural heritage, traditions, and political leanings and to what extent can we label what has come from their own intergenerational tendencies as something truly akin to bigotry or demonizing? Perhaps I let my opposition to religion skew my larger point about how our own culturally-shaped perspectives define the way we see the world in relation to personal governance. I do see the points you and lifterdead are making and I do understand them and, for the most part, I even agree with them. But even though encroaching on religious practices impresses upon the individual level of things, isn't that the right of a people, provided its within the legal rights of their own constitutional equivalent, to vote in such a way? (I don't know if it is; too lazy to research French law.) Westerners aren't the ones forcing laws on Middle-Eastern cultures here. Americans were largely against the ban. This is the French, whose opinion on the matter is shared by other European cultures. As lifterdead said, we can call this more oppressive if we want, but is this too not a belief - albeit a, what I'd like to think, more enlightened one - that we're positing on someone else's culture? Again, I just think this runs too deep to call it inherently wrong, for other peoples view the purpose of government in different ways and have been doing so for generations. Mindsets like this don't disappear. Sure, we can contend that the countries with the most freedoms are generally the most prosperous, perhaps even progressive. But we'll never get to the bottom of this, as there's no objective reasoning that's truly applicable here, for we have no collective human culture. Maybe I'm way off base here, but the French aren't telling people what to believe while the arguments against the ban seems to tell them what they believe about their government's place in society is wrong.
