I dislike burqas but I think banning them by law is not civilized behavior for a modern nation.
Hitchens, however, is fine with banning them. In discussing the proposed French ban on burqas:
http://www.slate.com/id/2253493/
The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers "only" the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a "ban." To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another.
Hitchens is usually much better than this level of nonsense. What about women who CHOOSE to wear it? What's next? Would you favor banning orthodox Jewish men from wearing hats or yarmulkes? Would you ban orthodox Jewish women from wearing wigs?
On the door of my bank in Washington, D.C., is a printed notice politely requesting me to remove any form of facial concealment before I enter the premises. The notice doesn't bore me or weary me by explaining its reasoning: A person barging through those doors with any sort of mask would incur the right and proper presumption of guilt. This presumption should operate in the rest of society. I would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face, let alone a tax inspector or customs official. Where would we be without sayings like "What have you got to hide?" or "You dare not show your face"?
A bank, as a private business, can have whatever rules it likes. If a bank sets a policy that they will not provide counter service to people who are concealing their faces, I have no problem with that at all. This is NOT the same thing as a federal law that bans the garments being worn ANYWHERE.
Ah, but the particular and special demand to consider the veil and the burqa as an exemption applies only to women. And it also applies only to religious practice (and, unless we foolishly pretend otherwise, only to one religious practice). This at once tells you all you need to know: Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith, one faith that has a very questionable record in respect of females.
Well, the burqa shouldn't be exempted from the bank's rules, period. Your problem here, Mr. Hitchens, is with the bank's inconsistent policy.
Let me ask a simple question to the pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa. What about the Ku Klux Klan? Notorious for its hooded style and its reactionary history, this gang is and always was dedicated to upholding Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity.
Comparing women who wear a veil to the klan is a low, irrational blow. The klan wore hoods to conceal their identity as they did illegal and reprehensible things like lynching people.
I do not deny the right of the KKK to take this faith-based view, which is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I might even go so far as to say that, at a rally protected by police, they could lawfully hide their nasty faces. But I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into the bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to.
No, Mr. Hitchens, you are not required to do ANY business with someone who wears the veil. Why are you suggesting that this could be expected of you?
It might be objected that in some Muslim societies women are not allowed to drive in the first place. But that would absolutely emphasize my second point. All the above criticisms would be valid if Muslim women were as passionately committed to wearing a burqa as a male Klansman is committed to donning a pointy-headed white shroud. But, in fact, we have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice.
Well, you could ASK them. I think a lot of men and women wear particular clothes or groom themselves in particular ways because their spouse/family/culture demands it. If a woman chooses to throw off this tradition and is PUNISHED for it, a civilized nation would seek justice against anyone who metes out such punishment.
But this argument is sooooo weak. How do I know, Mr. Hitchens, that you don't constantly look sweaty and drunk because your wife intimidates you into wearing woolen undergarments and sucking down endless amounts of scotch? Would you have us ban woolen underwear and scotch to protect you from your wife?
A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk.
This is of course true. Again, if a woman in a civilized nation chooses not to wear the veil and is mistreated as a result, THAT is a crime we can prosecute.
Many women of all religious and non-religious backgrounds in western nations are routinely intimidated into subservience by their families/husbands/communities/religions. The best we can do is seek to make such women aware of their real legal rights and ensure that any who seek to get between women and their rights are promptly smacked by the law.
This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states?
Well, now Hitchens is just being dishonest. The western nations will NEVER pass laws requiring that citizens wear veils, yarmulkes or crucifixes. To equate France with Saudi Arabia because France doesn't ban the veil is disingenuous.
The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate.
Here in the United States, Mr. Hitchens, we don't force people to integrate.
While is not illegal to wear a ski mask, we cannot outlaw the veil.
I cannot adequately express my disappointment in Hitchens, whose work on religion and civil liberties I usually find quite worthy of admiration.
