French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced yesterday that the burqa — the head-to-toe garment worn by some Muslim women — is “not welcome” in France, and the French National Assembly is now preparing an inquiry into whether the enshrouding of women to shield them from the view of men other than their owners is so fundamentally at odds with Western secular culture that it should be outlawed. In his words:
The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. This is an issue of a woman’s freedom and dignity. This is not a religious symbol. It is a sign of subservience; it is a sign of lowering. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France.
I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Sarkozy that the burqa is indeed an affront to everything that a modern secular nation should stand for. It is a public symbol of inequality and religious oppression, of a grotesque, tribalistic, culture-of-honor system of andrarchic, repressive sexuality that has no place in the modern world. It is no different than leading women about on a dog-leash.
I must ask myself, though, whether to take such an attitude is consistent with my generally libertarian attitude regarding personal conduct. If an adult woman and man enter into an agreement whereby the man shall lead her around in public, on her hands and knees, by a leash, is it the State’s role to interfere?
In this case I am inclined to say yes, as it is clearly in the interest of European culture, for the sake of its own survival in the face of an accelerating demographic cataclysm, to make itself infertile soil for this sort of alien fundamentalism. There is no shortage of places where Muslims are not only free, but encouraged, to subjugate and abase their women in this way; there is no need for France, the very cradle of the Enlightenment, to make itself one of them.