No, apples and oranges. It would be hard to distinguish if the Muslims wanted to wear necklaces with the crescent or something and we were preventign them.

It's different. The veil is political. Islam cannot and will never render unto Caesar.

See.

A false equivalency. Face-masks and burnooses provide concealment for identities and bomb-vests. A valid secular purpose applies to modes of concealment and not to pure symbols.

Render unto Caesar is all well and good, but I must say that there sure seem to be a lot of Christians around here who want to render to him a lot more than he is asking for.

Lou:

Of course there are always good secular reasons for banning religion.

And not render what God commands, the natural corollary.

This reminds me of all those who get irate over the courts allowing the Byron (CA) Unified School District to teach a couple of units about Islam, while complaining that Christians like them would never get the same treatment. It's as though no one on the Right ever thinks in a strategic manner.

While OJ is certainly correct that these bans are indistinguishable, the fact remains that all of the bans are wrong.

One only need to look at the idiotic French to see how their racist/classist society puts Islamic people in a ghetto, yet demands that they girls in public school not wear their veil.

The CA school district is simply another example.

The best rule is expressed, but often edited from, the 1st Amendment..."nor prohibiting the free exercise there of"

I suppose one could argue that crucifixes can be sharpened and used as weapons but it is silly. I don't recall there being a big problem with Christians hijacking airplanes.

jp

More moral equivalency gone mad. Not only haven't Christians hi-jacked airplanes, they haven't, to my knowledge, been exhorted by their religion to kill their female relatives because they didn't wear a crucifix in the proscribed manner, nor have they strapped explosives around the waists of their children and sent them out into public places to kill themselves and as many Jews as they the can.

There is nothing Islamic about face-covering veils. Allah only commands women to dress modestly, and only specifically mentions the covering of breasts (in the Koran). Modesty is in the eye of the beholder, it is a cultural thing. There is a difference between promoting public modesty and wanting to prevent women from appearing in society altogether. There are only two reasons for a man to never want to see women in public: One is his inability to control himself sexually, the other is simple misogyny. What’s your excuse oj? A woman’s face is not any more inherently sexual than a man’s. I prefer a culture that expects men to act modestly to one that treats women like sex toys hidden away in the bottom dresser-drawer.

There is nothing Islamic about face-covering veils. Allah only commands women to dress modestly, and only specifically mentions the covering of breasts (in the Koran). Modesty is in the eye of the beholder, it is a cultural thing. There is a difference between promoting public modesty and wanting to prevent women from appearing in society altogether. There are only two reasons for a man to never want to see women in public: One is his inability to control himself sexually, the other is simple misogyny. What’s your excuse oj? A woman’s face is not any more inherently sexual than a man’s. I prefer a culture that expects men to act modestly to one that treats women like sex toys hidden away in the bottom dresser-drawer.

erp,

While I agree with you that "moral equivalency" is bankrupt and moronic, I would humbly submit to you that a major reason why the GOP is 'thisclose' to losing the House is because too many of us on the conservative side went to the "If this had been a Christian/Republican...." well too many times. Sooner or later, people will start calling you on it, and ask you to start acting like a winner and not a whiner.

Which was a reason I made the strategic comment. I'd be asking for a syllabus of that Islam program and seeing if I can offer a similar program that is Christian oriented. After all, the 9th Circus has set the precedent!

seeing if I can offer a similar program that is Christian oriented.

And if the local school board still says no, then threaten to behead them...

The best way to get people to tolerate your religion is to be intolerant of anyone who isn't of your religion, or so it seems, and don't think that some Christians aren't noticing this.

seeing if I can offer a similar program that is Christian oriented.

And if the local school board still says no, then threaten to behead them...

The best way to get people to tolerate your religion is to be intolerant of anyone who isn't of your religion, or so it seems, and don't think that some Christians aren't noticing this.

Hijackings aren't a problem period.

The Christians have killed 1.2 million Iraqi muslims alone.

Shelton:

It has nothing to do with men. It's between God and women.

oj -

It's all about the men. Allah only asks women to cover their breasts. It is Arab men who have a problem with faces.

Point Shelton.

Shelton:

That's what you believe, not what Muslim women believe. (Nor what the text says)

Of course, God nowhere asks folks to wear crucifixes, so the Brights have a stronger case when they demand Christians stop wearing them, likewise Jews and their tefillin and whatnot, since they are by their nature divisive.

Like I said, you guys are hilarious when you try differentiating this stuff.

The sub-text of a lot of opinion here seems to be that wearing a cross is ok because we all know how inoffensive and anodyne it is. How far down that road do you want to go?

Peter:

Even better, Shelton and G are arguing that only those observances that are specifically delineated by God need be tolerated. Thus, presumably, Communion is safe, but you can stop Catholics from serving those wafers instead of 1st Century-style bread.

Only a small percentage of Muslim women believe covering their faces at all times in public is what God wants. Visit Jakarta or KP or even Tehran and you can see for yourself. Don't confuse head and neck covering with the covering of the face.

Even taking your point for granted, so what? Many Muslims believe that crashing commercial airliners into skyscrapers is what God wants them to do. Is that between them and God? What if my god wants me to wear a Klan hood at work? Is that OK? Of course it isn't, stop being such a relativist pansy. Such nonsense leads to a culture where any sort of aberrant behavior is excused by individual belief.

Our culture is right and theirs is wrong. To invoke the spirit of C.J. Napier I say; In our culture masks are for hiding. If you choose to wear a mask you give up your right to participate in public activities. In our culture women are equal citizens not property. If you don't like it you are welcome to leave.

If a particular Islamic god wants women to be treated as chattle then that god is the enemy of the American God and he should be exiled from our culture.

I distinguish them on the grounds that Christianity is a better religion.

And I'm an atheist. But my observation is that Christians, Jews, Hindus & Buddhists make fine neighbors. Objectivists tend to be unhelpful in emergencies and Scientologists litigious, but otherwise they're still pretty tolerable.

Muslims sometimes go "boom."

I see a symbols of Muslim identity as comparable not to a cross, but to a Che Guevara T-shirt or a swastika armband.

"The Chrisitians have killed 1.2 million Iraqi muslims alone."

Which Christians? What sect? Under the orders of what Religious leader?

At any rate you should subtract at least eleven Iraqi muslims from that number - that being the number of Hajis popped by my neighbor durng his tour in 2003-04. My neighbor is Bahai.

I'm positive there are more.

jp

"Hijackings aren't a problem period."

Only from your Ivory Tower End of History perspective. Which is why it's practically useless.

jp

oj-

I don't care at all what their God has to say on the subject, just what mine has to say.

The Koran, the beliefs of other muslims, were put forward for your benefit, since you seem to think we should change our culture for the sake of certain Islamic beliefs, I'd just like to know how you deliniate which Islamic beliefs to choose from? All of them? Of course not. Those beliefs that contradict our own are out. In our culture covering people's faces is wrong.

jp:

That's our genius, we make even Bahai into Crusaders.

Shelton:

Yes, no one proposes that we require them to veil, only that they be allowed to. Your confusion multiplies.

Shelton, I completely disagree that the reason we are "this close" to losing the house is because we have used the Christian/Republican meme too many times. I don't think we are in danger of losing, but if I'm wrong about that, it will be because we are too timid in pointing out that there is quite a difference between our behavior and that of our opponents ... and, oj, the Koran doesn't seem to say that the wearing of burqas and honor killings are articles of faith for observant Moslems, but even if they were, our law of the land must prevail.

Murder could not be permitted in our country whether or not the murderer felt he had a God-given right to do so, neither can we allow religious beliefs to interfere with an orderly society. While people may wear the dress of their choice, if they want an ID or a job, it's incumbant on them to "do as the Romans do," not for us 'Romans' to revamp our society to accommodate them. The Bookworm Room http://bookwormroom.wordpress.com/ has an excellent essay on this topic today.

Shelton:

Bingo. Once you stop caring what God says the rest follows.

jp:

How many American planes have been hijacked in the past 300 years? How many by women in veils? You're letting your Islamophobia overcome your attachment to reality.

Shelton:

In our culture covering people's faces is wrong

That's not completely unreasonable, but why are you not able to take that argument and run with it a bit and tell us why calmly without trashing cultures that think differently? Can't you articulate and defend what you think your own cultural values are without slipping into the fevered "Muslims go bump in the night" drivel?

I don't suffer from Islamophobia. I just try to balance out your Islamophilia.

jp

Take the number of airliners hijacked or intentionally destroyed and divide them into two columns. 1. Islamic terrorists and 2. Christian terrorists.

Interesting result.

jp

Ralph:

Exactly, it's just subjective and emotional.

"Islamophobia"

Sigh.
A phobia is an *irrational* fear.
Islam's bloody borders are plain for all to see.

Peter:

Not completely unreasonable, it's complete nonsense. Doctors, dentists, firemen, etc. all cover their faces. Hospitals ask visitors to do so during cold and flu season. Etc.

"We make even Bahai into Crusaders."

Neither he nor his colleagues are crusaders. They're just Americans who kill bad guys.

jp

jp:

That's the Crusade.

jp:

So you came up with zero too.

Ralph:

Yes, you should be afraid to visit the bloody borders. You are instead terrified of the veil. Thus, phobia.

Yeah, it's all those unveiled islamic terrorists that bother me.

jp

Lucky for you that you can take it out on innocent Muslim women.

Yeah, I'll smite them hip and thigh with my BA banned crucifix. That sounds very Crusadey, don'tcha think?

Hey, let's call them witches and you can join in the fun!

jp

Orrin:

Look, I'm not buying the oppression of women line or the amateur psycho-sexual drivel, but there are issues that arise in combining the veil with full integration in public life. Orthodox Hasids don't make senior partner in Wall Street law firms, so are we talking about respecting choice or compelling acceptance everywhere? It's not even a womens' issue necessarily. Doing business with a covered face is different and we don't always have a choice of who we do business with.

OTOH, the prospect of the IRS sending out a veiled auditor to your house is just so delicious to contemplate that I may withdraw all objections.

"Christians have killed 1.2 million Iraqi muslims."

Just like we killed 200 million American Indians. More alternative universe stuff.

Peter B -

If anything I'm the voice of reason when it comes to Muslims around here. I'm the only one defending the majority of Muslims from being maligned by a small Islamic sect from the Arabian desert.

Get it straight, Arab culture is not the same thing as Islam. OJ always equates the two, though to be fair that is a common mistake in the US. Before I met my wife (and her Indonesian Muslim step-mother and Muslim father) I might have had the same silly notions. Your heart is in the right place, it is a good thing to admire religious devotion, orthodoxy, tradition, and reverence. Yet in your zeal to welcome believers into the flock you are adding scalding hot water to the baby's bath. Religious devotion is not in itself a sign of goodness. You are maligning Islam by equating the evil and inhuman practices of certain Arab cultures with Islam itself. Worse, you and oj ignorantly suggest that these backwards beliefs are somehow the will of Allah, which according to most Muslims they are not. If I am an Islamaphobe for my belief that women should be treated as people rather than as sexual objects, then inexplicably all of the Muslims I know are also Islamaphobes. Weird.

If oj will argue that polygamy should be legal for the sake of those Mormon-offshoots out in Utah then I will at least concede that he has some consistency in his philosophy. It is the exact same argument. As for me, there are some things that our culture doesn’t accept, even if the practitioners claim it is the will of god, because our God claims otherwise.

OJ’s law: the longer a thread continues the sillier oj becomes.

Surely you can recognize the difference between a mask worn for purposes of protection during the performance of a job and a mask worn to hide from society. Is it socially acceptable for a welder to wear his mask when he goes to the bank to get a loan? Is it acceptable for a surgeon to wear a Klan hood or ski mask to surgery rather than a doctor’s mask? Silly.

Shelton:

Ah, but you have things precisely backwards. You want to allow masks for trivial utilitarian purposes but ban them for transcendental ones. You've elevated germs above God. Of course, that makes you the perfect Bright.

As always, the longest threads are those where rationalist ideologues argue against God. It's not like they can win.

Peter:

You really think Exxon/Mobil won't do business with Iraq if the oil minister wears a veil?

Lou:

No one cares how many Indians we killed either, we can use your estimate instead. we took the country and did with it what we wanted. It's who we are. It's what we do.

oj -

There is nothing transcendental about slavery.

Obedience to God is not slavery.

Shelton:

I'm listening. But you are quite wrong if you think I have any views on the will of Allah or any interest in finding out what that is. I've seen enough amateur koranic analysis around here to know it's a favourite tool to promote general bigotry. I'd rather just listen to what Muslims tell me and remember that we are supposed to respect religious observance as they define it, not as we do.

And that is the rub. I'm well aware of the past struggle against the veil and also what it signifies today in Iran and under the Taliban (which are not Arab). And I've already said I don't like it much and would be delighted never to see one. But this story started when Jack Straw made his comment and was immediately challenged by angry Muslim women, including lots of young, educated ones. I've yet to see one article suggesting they did it because they were afraid of their husbands. You can analogize this to suttee or foot-binding in China all you want, but it seems to me there are lots of Muslim women out there saying the better analogy is Amish dresses and bonnets. Should I listen to them or just to you?

Contrary to OJ, I do see objections in public life that have to be worked out. Our culture gets to push back too sometimes. That dialogue isn't helped when every time Muslims in the West raise an issue (praying at work, not transporting booze, calls to prayer, etc.) they are met with a cacophony of screeching about what dangerous, menacing savages they are and how everything about them is incompatible with our ways.

Peter B -

I understand you and I see the knee-jerkism you refer to as well. Of course the jerking goes both ways around here where offering any criticism of Islam or Arab culture gets you labeled a racist and athiest.

There can be made some compelling arguments for face-covering veils, but none have me convinced. The face veil is misogynistic and anti-social. That's not an indictment of Islam or even of Arabs, its a complaint against a particular tradition. Likewise I believe low rise jeans, tube tops, and tramp-stamps are misogynistic, oddly enough for the many of the same reasons as the veil. That doesen't make me anti-American. One can be critical of any number of features of a particular culture without being an "aphobe".

Shelton:

Your mistake lies in your belief that convincing you matters to anyone but you. It's a matter between Muslim women and God. You couldn't matter less.

Wearing a veil (or not) is not my issue.

But when Muslim men demand that women be 'hidden' because to see them is a temptation (which, to be fair, appears to be a minority report), they reveal their contempt for themselves. And that contempt is often quite dangerous to Muslim women, even in many Western countries.

I have no strong opinion on the veil; it has roots in Christianity after all.

What I have a strong opinion about is the tradition of my country (and, more indirectly, that of Britain, the immediate ancestor of my country). That tradition owes an incalculable debt to Christianity; and it owes almost nothing to Islam. The latter is an alien faith and culture which for most of its history has been engaged in a war of conquest and subjugation against Christendom.

My religion tells me I must love men, not creeds; and I have no love for Islam. Without apology I affirm that the tradition of my country discriminates against it (because it privileges the Christian religion), and ought to continue to do so.

Certain Islamic doctrines are objectively wicked. Holy war (jihad) and holy subjugation (dhimmia), for example; and because we are a people which cleaves to certain truths, these doctrines should be removed from the protection of law. They should be proscribed, in thought, word, and deed.

Such firm action against doctrines is hardly alien to our tradition. We proscribed (in law) the doctrines of Communists, Nazis, anarchists, polygamists, secessionists (in the North), Unionists (in the South), and Jacobins, each in turn. There is, in fact, a vigorous tradition in American politics of discerning doctrines which enjoin disloyalty, and prohibiting them.

Jihad enjoins disloyalty. It is religious sedition. It should be proscribed.

Paul:

You have that exactly right--this has nothing to do with the veil, which is part of our common Abrahamic tradition. It's just an attack on religion generally and certain people in particular.

Yes, but you see, since I am unimpressed with that fastidious abstraction of equality which would have me treat an alien religion as I treat the religion which has incubated my country and my culture, I have no problem saying that a crucifix should be privileged over Islamic symbols.

Paul:

Yes, so you feel. But you've already ceded that ground to the seculars who you've helped ban religious suymbols period. They see no difference between your cross and the veil, as they shouldn't.

jim:

Which has nothing to do with this. In fact, what's at issue is the desire of European men to impose their will on Muslim women.

I don't know if I'm a "secular", but I'm an atheist, and I sure see a difference between the cross and the veil.

A devout Jew's religion says he should do his thing, and I mine, and it's ok if I don't believe.

A devout Christian's religion says he should keep on trying to persuade me to see the light. Irritating at worst.

A devout Muslim's religion says if I don't convert he's allowed to kill me (if practical.)

I'm not big on PC, so don't try to hold me to PC version of freedom of religion that says if we allow Jews to slaughter cows in a nonstandard manner we have to allow followers of Kali to sacrifice children.

Common sense tells me the Islam, whose followers are currently at war with Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, "animists", secularists, and anyone else "not Islam" is a special case.

I'm happy to use the seculars to resist Islam, which is the larger, older, and immeasurably deeper enemy.

There is a budding alliance between atheistic nihilism and Islam; I'm eager to see it broken.

Paul:

Islamicism, not Islam. And Islamicism is just a Western import. The alliance isn't budding, it was there from the get go.

Ralph:

We Christians have killed more people making them like us than any junior religion can ever hope to. It's why Christ came:

49 I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be
already kindled?

50 But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened
till it be accomplished!

51 Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay;
but rather division:

52 For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three
against two, and two against three.

53 The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the
father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the
mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter
in law against her mother in law.

A distinction without difference.

Islamicism is to Islam as Marxism or Darwinism is to Christianity--simple heresy.

A ridiculous comparison. Neither Marxism nor Darwinism are Christian heresies.

I suppose the faction of Islam that is making war against us may be an Islamic heresy. Let us hope it is. But in any case it is a very old and potent one.

Of course they are, which dictated their form--proposed by bearded prophets, positing omnipotent external forces, leading towards perfection, etc., etc.. (Freudianism too.)

Those are the forms of nearly all heresies, but to be regarded as actual Christian heresies, there must be some direct connection to Christian doctrine, some significant portion of that doctrine that is retained.

No, only Judeo-Christianity requires that form, which is why they're generally so trivial outside the West or have to be transposed into new forms for other cultures (as Maoism).

OJ:

I understand, but don't you think the "desire of European men to impose their will on Muslim women" is a loaded phrase? After all, I doubt if Jack Straw has any Senator Bilbo in him. He is probably more worried about the abject refusal with portions of Islam to compromise in the slightest on any public policy issue.

In the US, the one instance I recall where the veil became a public issue was with the woman in Florida who didn't want her driver's license to show her face. Not a good example (she didn't have a case), but there just hasn't been the same intrasigence here.

Loaded? No, I think it precisely describes what's going on. We want to break Muslims and make them conform to our standards--forcible conversion, if you will. There's nothing wrong with that as a general matter, the veil just happens to be an area where their standards aren't objectionable. More importantly, the Euro-secular standard--that any religious observance that tends to be divisive ought be banned--is objectionable.

Paul:

I'm not sure I follow all of Orrin's theological manderings, but why would you object to his characterization of communism as a Christian heresy? Both oppose domination by the rich. Both offer apocalyptic solutions to oppression, albeit on different time and space lines. Both eschew the material, except one offers spiritual justice and the other offers a idealized material one, give or take a genocide or two. Sound like Anyone you can think of?

Because if he doesn't his argument falls apart. However it's rather an orthodox view of the isms (Darwinism/Marxism/Freudianism)