I just cannot see forcing a woman to reveal a part of her body she is not comfortable revealing as [View all]

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an expression of "enlightened secularism".

So France just passed a law forbidding what has been called "burquini", a type of bathing suit that covers most of the body, including the head, but not the face. And now they have cops wandering around on beaches, harassing women and forcing them to take off pieces of clothing. And all of it is being sold as a display of the "superior progressiveness of the West". Congratulations.

What people often overlook in this is that most traditions surrounding clothing, and food for that matter, while they may or may not have a religious origin in principle, ultimately exist in practice fully in their own right, uncoupled from what created them in the first place. Ultimately it is our upbringing that conditions us to differentiate which parts of our body are private and which foods are edible. There need not be any religion involved at all for such customs to take hold.

My step dad, who is from Pakistan, and who is in fact a practicing Muslim, does not avoid pork because "his god told him to". He avoids it because he finds it disgusting. Pigs are dirty animals and eating them is disgusting. It is that simple. The origin of this tradition might be religious. In the end, who cares? I eat pork, but I find it disgusting that the French eat snails. I don't need a religion for that. I simply find that they are slimy and disgusting. See how that works?

Likewise, the Turkish Muslim women that I went to school with, who later earned college degrees and remained unmarried by choice, would just as soon go in public without a veil as non-Muslim American women would go to work with their breasts exposed. They simply feel like their hair is no ones business. I find that I no more have the right to demand that a woman show her hair than I have the right to demand that she show her breasts. It is that simple.

In my view, what France has done, with cops running around forcing women to show their hair, is creating what amounts to systemic sexual assault. Congratulations France, you are so very classy and secular.

By the way, I find it telling that they are pushing pork on school children but not snails and frogs. I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact that this might alienate the "good" kind of immigrants.