i think you're hitting the right notes, afew, but poemless' point is also well taken, if fact i think you're both right, and that's why this issue has been blown up out of all reasonable proportion, and is possibly being used as a political football. we as a species are too hung up on symbols, and too incurious as to why, why should we give them so much power?

just because people have in the past?

as for being objective, i think that what people in the majority consensus believe, a kind of groupthink.

it's a very thorny problem, and as i've said before, i wearily concede that europe need still to err on the side of being too secular, due to its history.

weary, because it is frustrating to be presented a choice wherein both feel passionately they're in the right, and no matter which way the legislation goes, it will leave bad blood in its wake.

these loser/losest dichotomies are a reflection of how far we still have to travel on the road to understanding, with all the real, concrete problems we have in the world, it is absurd to see valuable mental energy consumed on whether wearing a certaina head-dress is so politically destabilising an act, that it needs the state 'deciders' to wrinkle their foreheads to come up with a least worst decision, not an enviable responsibility.

i'm still reeling from poemless' description of how it must feel to be a woman in this stupid (patriarchal) bind, and urge all males here to try and put ourselves for a minute in that woman's shoes. she is being instrumentalised in a way by the state in its quest for secularisation, and she has to force her parental family to accept her 'europeanisation', or risk a fine or arrest.

we say we want to welcome immigrants, and need to, to keep our economies going, this legislation is unpalatable, but to permit burkas is regressive, from our european post-enlightenment value system, giving again more power to the symbol.

full circle...

an eddy of idiocy, in a river of rationality, heading for a world where symbols are seen as that, not confused anything else. they will always be important, because of how we're made, but we need to keep pointing out they are the pointing finger, not the moon, and looking for a deeper unity that predates such external 'designations' as choice of dress.

for example, let's look harder at why certain immigrant religious tenets impose restrictions on young europeans, why cultures have evolved so patriarchally, why the female body is turned into such an explosively, threateningly icon that men feel they cannot stand its distraction, just for a start.

after i had some moroccan massage clients in hawaii, i had to re-examine cultural attitudes a bit, because they told me how comfortable they felt behind the veil, how they felt sorry for the women who had to be exposed to the crude stares and wolf whistle types, while shopping in the supermarket, or walking past a construction site. how it empowered them and became a  boundary on intimacy they felt very grateful for.

it was definitely one of the oddest moments of my massage career, working on the rest of her disrobed body, while never seeing her face. her mother was the same.

not all veiling is a response to patriarchal authoritarianism, and i think we should allow all freedoms we can, yet i am as grateful as they were for their cultural gift, that ours is that we get to see our women, glory in their comeliness, without having to be their blood family.

it's impossible to make both sides happy, which is a sign usually that the real problems are not being fully addressed, namely that our sexual mores appall many immigrant families, used to a culture where women are tucked_just_ in sight, partly out of mind.

could there be a correlation between the amount of violence in cultures that slow down feminism of culture, and desire for peace in countries where women are not put on pedestals, vestalised so much?

as men, is it our own inability to come to grips with our inner feminine side that makes us historically seek to control women?

are we possibly still over-reacting the other way, after many centuries of treating women as chattel ourselves? now women are freer, but does that mean they (and we men) are always more dignified because of it?

i suspect we will meet half way, no veils and burkas except for halloween, and less ignorance and flagrancy in our own youth about the responsibility of being sexual in today's world, where we are more likely to see hundreds of photoshopped womens' bodies selling us everything from soap to cars to chocolate, before we even attain puberty.

another 50 years ought to do it...

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~