I'm totally against women being forced, or feeling they are obligated to wear any kind of garb because of a religious bent (in any country)!
Debates over whether to ban the burqa often assume that women are forced by men to wear it. In many Muslim countries, women lack equality and basic rights that other women take for granted; therefore, the burqa may seem to be is just one more example of patriarchal control.
There is some evidence that women in particularly conservative countries are forced to wear a burqa or niqab out of fear of beatings, arrests or honor killings. But what of those women in France who Sarkozy addressed in his 2009 speech?
Many of these women, both in strictly Islamic countries and in Western countries, have insisted to countless reporters that wearing a full covering is their choice and their right.
As believing Muslims, they interpret their holy text to mean that their faces must be covered.
Many women also say that the hijab isn't a tool of subjugation at all, but rather a means for equality. Their reasoning for this is that in public, they aren't judged on their appearance.
They are free from unwelcome male advances and liberated from objectifying leers. Naomi Wolf, writer of "The Beauty Myth," commented in an editorial for the Sydney Morning Herald that these women were far from sexually repressed; they just kept their sexual appeal under wraps in a way that made it more special within the bonds of marriage.
Another reason women say they continue to wear the veil is for purposes of group identity. It's a badge of honor and solidarity in a world full of negative opinions about Islam. Some women have suggested that if countries like France were to ban the veil, it would only cause more women to wear it in defiance.
Kopes, I think it is all a matter of how women come through the various systems of certain cultures which originally did, and still does, obligate many women to be covered in the way they are within those areas/countries (and further out).
While it is true to say that many women do feel it is their choice, and it probably is depending where they are and how they personally function (or are permitted to function) in their immediate societies, it is also true that the heavy religious side of it is perpetually right in their face with no real say and even psychologically, they cannot even mentally escape due to those beliefs.
It also depends on their home situation also, and I have seen a few women here in Tasmania fully covered . So be it, but would it be their "choice", who really knows?
I've lived and worked in two countries where for the women, it is the "nightmare of zero choice"; break the dress rules and they are severely punished in ways you could never imagine. It is basically all about religious abuse when it comes down to it.
Cloistered nuns who really do choose to cover up do have that choice; don't want to live that kind of religious life? .. don't join it, and they can leave if it doesn't work out. Thankfully, with the dubious wishes of Vatican 2, many left their convents and became religious "sisters" living out in the real world and dressing as they wished, so that is some semblance of genuine democratic choice.
Personally, I see these/most/if not all religions as mentally and morally primitive, used as a way to dominate and strike fear into people who cannot see the woods for the trees in their lives, so to speak.
That doesn't mean, in my opinion, that people cannot be "spiritual", it just means you don't need to be herded into the rampant gobbledegook offered by religious charlatans who put themselves above what the person of Jesus really intended, if that was his intention.
Totally agree with you.
I posted the above merely to show some different points of view and they are not my beliefs.
(I should have put it in Italics as I cut n pasted it from some news story).
