Gal-Bag Semiotics

It's not the burka per se that's the problem, writes Toronto Sun columnist Michael Coren. The problem is what the burka betokens:

The premise behind it is that once women reach the age of puberty they arouse men and so they have to be disguised and, in a way, disfigured. We are all products of appetite rather than taste.

Very few Muslim women wear the thing and the Qur’an does not call for full covering but for modesty. Yet burka-wearers are increasing in number and a headdress or something similar for women is becoming mandatory in many parts of the Islamic world.

Forget the politics for a moment. What it says about people is that we are animalistic, that we cannot master our desires and that we are creatures capable not of love, gentleness and grace, but of aggression, lust and violence. It degrades all of us and hurts society as well as the individuals involved.

Look through the thick cloth to the thick implication. If this woman is not hidden you will desire her, it says, and if you desire her you will take her. Also, it continues, it is not then the man who must change his ways, but the woman who must suffer so that he does not have to. That some women may embrace all this is not at all unusual in an abusive, power-perverted relationship.

It’s directly contrary to Christianity for example, which has taught equality of the sexes since the beginning of the faith. If you don’t believe me, read, intelligently, the New Testament and the church fathers.

We need to ask if this anti-human approach to sex and gender is any different from the anti-human use of people as bombs, the anti-human use of children as political tools and the anti-human use of religion as extreme political violence. We can ban certain types of dress as much as we want, but unless the heart and the mind change we will achieve nothing.

Exactly. Also in the Toronto Sun, Robin Anderson muses about the wisdom--or marked absence thereof--of driving while wearing a vision-obscuring shmatta on your face.