{"id":3053,"date":"2010-07-13T23:17:13","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T22:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3053"},"modified":"2010-07-15T11:42:54","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T10:42:54","slug":"should-the-full-veil-be-banned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3053","title":{"rendered":"Should the full veil be banned?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The news today is that the French National Assembly has voted to ban the wearing of the full veil in public. I&#8217;ve debated this issue with various friends who have taken different positions on the matter. My own position is against a ban.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, I am both a secularist and a feminist, so I am very uncomfortable and unhappy to see Muslim women covering their face.\u00a0 I wish that they would not do so. On the other hand, I am a cosmopolitan individual who respects cultural differences and I am a libertarian who believes that as a guiding principle people should be free to do what they want as long as this freedom does not curtail the freedom of others.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, of the 64 million living in France, 5 million are Muslims but only an estimated 2,000 wear the full veil. This makes me wonder if much of the opposition is xenophobic and anti-Islamic. I expect &#8211; and hope &#8211; that the ban will be reviewed by the French Constitutional Court and, if it survives that review, challenged at the European Court of Human Rights.<\/p>\n<p>BBC online has a visual guide to the different types of Muslim female headscarves <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/europe\/10611398.stm\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The news today is that the French National Assembly has voted to ban the wearing of the full veil in public. I&#8217;ve debated this issue with various friends who have taken different positions on the matter. My own position is against a ban. On the one hand, I am both a secularist and a feminist, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3053"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3062,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053\/revisions\/3062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}