More on "blanket" rules..

Following in the vein of the anti-Burqa thread yesterday here is an article which I think gets underneath the skin of this issue, it's not about what people can or cannot wear it's about what's in this Washington Post article. Paula Kirby's criticism is not restricted to Islam, and so it shouldn't be, in Christianity for example there are explicit warrants in the Bible itself for this kind of attitude, for example in Ephesians 5 there is this little edict cosily sandwiched among rules about children obeying their parents and instructions for slave owners,

“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

Of course moderate Christians don't pay much attention to this kind of stuff from a morality point of view in the same way they don't continue to hold slaves, however when you have religious systems that fossilise bronze age social constructs and catapult them into the 21st century without any possibility for adaptation then you are asking for trouble. This kind of misogyny isn't restricted to the wackier fringes of Leviticus either as Paula points out, in the Gospel of John in the New Testament have you ever stopped to wonder what became of the male lover of the woman taken in adultery, why wasn’t he threatened with execution by stoning and hauled before Jesus?

Regardless of the specifics of the control mechanism, burqa or leg irons, regardless of the particular religious tradition it stems from, either you believe in the equality of the sexes or you don't, if the majority of people in France feel that they do believe in this then their law on Burqa's seems reasonable (albeit arbitrary), if a country doesn't have such a law then the politicians need to seriously address the questions in this article and not continue to hide behind the veil of pretending its about freedom of expression.

Finally I reproduce Paula's final paragraph, it's not so much about this particular issue but struck a chord with me because it talks to what I see as the obfuscating "word games" that seem to plague so much of the dialogue between believers and apologists and everyone else.

"Religion is one lie after another: the lie of original sin, the lie of eternal life, the lie of hell, the lie of answered prayer, the lie that life can have no meaning without religion, the lie that religion is the source of morality, the lie of creationism, the lie of a spy-in-the-sky who hears your every word and reads your every thought. And to this list we must add the lie that it views men and women as equal. It has got away for so long with the kind of lunatic word-games that allow death-by-torture to be presented as an act of love, and eternal torment in the flames of hell to be seen as a necessary act of justice, that we should perhaps not be surprised that it has also managed to dupe its followers into seeing the systematic suppression and silencing of women as an act of liberation and equality. Nevertheless, it is a lie, like all the others: a cynical and wicked lie. It is time women everywhere woke up to it."