Does it affect anyone else if you wear a silly that that's bad for your posture? No.
Are people only allowed to be free if they use their freedom wisely and never do silly things? No.
If you believe that lead hats are a good idea, and you wish to wear one, you should be allowed to do so because people are allowed to make mistakes.

Do you wish the legalisation of drugs and driving without seatbelts as well?
If laws are created it's to protect people, even if it's from themselves.

I can see how junkies are a menace and a threat to society. I can see how people who drive without seatbelts are a costly burden on the rest of society when we have to try and put their faces back together. But I can't see how the burqa is a threat or a burden to anyone else except the wearer.

I wouldn't object to a repeal of the law against wearing seatbelts, but I don't feel very strongly either way because I don't believe that driving without a seatbelt is a part of anyone's cultural or religious identity, or any other key liberty that matters.

Now let's follow your own argument to its logical conclusion. You have to ban chocolate, wine and cigarettes because they all kill lots of people and are unwise substances to consume.

I do believe cigarettes should be fully banned, but that's difficult considering the number of addicted people, one day maybe.
The burqa is a threat because some people are not wearing it willingly. How do you protect those women then? In your logic it's ok for them to suffer, because the others are free.

If you know that some women are not wearing it willingly then you also know two other things:
1. The others are willing, and in so doing are exercising a freedom, and therefore are only subject to coercion when you make them take it off.
2. there is some way to tell which is which.

Therefore you need only make a law saying that women cannot be forced to wear it, and to make a law banning it altogether is therefore a coercive abuse, which is supposed to be what you are against.

Because obviously they are going to go with their husband in front of them to the police station to warn that they are forced to wear the burqa. Then get beaten or burnt alive or shot when they get home for that.
The burqa is only a representative of some bigger issue between men and women. Banning it is only a step towards improving equality. I understand that the UK is a multicultural country and that my point is a bit too extreme for you, but i'll still defend it.

A woman who is utterly unable to contact the outside world without in any way without her evil murderous husband chopping her face off has worse problems than a burqa, and will not see them alleviated by having her dress banned.



Your point isn't too extreme for me, it's too inconsistent. You want to force women to live their lives according to your will and have the nerve to suggest that this is for their improved freedom. You are a born oppressor.

I don't understand the need for the idea of a "banning" society.

Some things are crimes because they are a detriment to society, murder, rape, etc. When you take away any ability for people to make their own decisions about how they live their lives, WTF is the point in living a life in the first place? In lots of countries they have lax laws about seatbelts and have no more or less accidents than anywhere else. What ever happened to diversity and the freedom of people to be individuals? Banning something doesn't make it wrong, it's just one part of society imposing their beliefs and morals on another part.

Why shouldn't women wear the burkha? Yes some women may be doing it for the wrong reasons, some women may be forced into it by a tyrannical husband, but what about the thousands of women who wear it by choice? If you ban it for the oppressed (who frankly have more to worry about than what they wear outside in public) then you have to ban it for everyone and bang goes another personal freedom.

If people want to do drugs, legalise them and tax them, but make sure people who want help to get clean can get it. People who are stupid enough to overdose in the full knowledge of what they are doing are in the same boat as the idiots who used to turn out the dumpsters behind the pharmaceutical company I used to work for, to heat up and inject the contents of anything they found. Honestly? I'd rather that they weren't in the gene pool.

If you start banning everything that is considered (by you - generic, not specific) to be detrimental to people then alcohol and chocolate, all food with saturated fat and smoking will be the first things to go. The NHS would have more of it's money to go around in that case, but the budget would be fcuked and there'd be a national outcry of a kind not seen for centuries. You can either have personal freedom on the understanding that some people will abuse it, or you can live in a nanny state where you are not allowed to make any decisions about your own life. I know which I'd prefer.

On the plus side, that kind of legislation could be used to stop some of Lady GaGa's more ridiculous outfits.

While the discussion is interesting, it misses a vital point - western society relies to a degree us to be able to identify each other to function properly. Maybe not in a 'every has to carry ID cards' kinds of way, but at least in so far as everyone can be aware in the environment around them as to who is there and what their intentions are. The ability to know who someone is and what they are doing or likely to do underpins the 'freedoms' that the discussion has been going over - if everyone was able to hide their identity from everyone else at any point, society would have to become much more repressive to still function at all.

Therefore, any form of significant obfuscation of identity requires either a very good reason or some immediate and obvious context. 'Because I want to' isn't a good enough reason - we have strictures that prohibit all sorts of things that people might want to do but we recognize that letting them do so is bad for society, even if they may still be legal.

This is the basis of the problem - that western society has a standard of... the idea that 'I am willing to give up a level of my personal privacy to show I have nothing to hide, on the basis that if I do not do so, we will all lose some of our basic privacy to the state'.

The nijab and burka come from a society with a different fundamental (not in that sense thank you) attitude towards personal privacy and public accountability to each other and thus are always going to be divisive in western society. They causes problems because they clash with one of the basic underlying assumptions of our society.

It's not as simple as just saying 'in a free society they should be able to wear what they want' because no society is actually free; all societies have both overt rules - we call them 'laws' - and unwritten assumed rules, the observance of which keeps the society running. The nijab/burqa clash with one of those unwritten rules in western society. My personal belief is they are an expression of an unwillingness to join that society, a desire to live outside the rules we all 'sign up for' subconsciously to allow us all to get on. I find them distasteful on that basis. Whether they are or are not oppressive to women is entirely something I have no evidence to base an opinion on.

Personally, I wish more people would cover themselves up. There's so many munters out there it churns my stomach.

I've never seen your face, but that doesn't cause me to doubt your sincerity. When we walk down the street we don't peer anxiously into each others eyes to discern possible threats, and in a society that was so face sensitive as you describe, telephones would be considered practically demonic. I'm not disputing that there are times when we do need to see each others faces, but it is certainly not the case that we need to see them in order to have basic civic intercourse.

There are many people who hate 'phones for that very reason, and personally I do look at people's faces to determine if they're a likely threat. I think most people do, because that's the way it's been since apes evolved facial expression.

Why do you think people are scared of "hoodies" ? It's because concealing your identity is threatening to most people in our society. Obviously waving a big club in the air is even more threatening, but we are sensitive to reading people's moods and reacting before such physical escalations.

The fact that some people are using it as a disguise for crime will not help those who wear it out of choice. Clicky

People should have the freedom to wear what they like.

Clearly where there are security concerns this should be accounted for, but otherwise people should wear what they please.