France considers burqa ban, sparking debate over liberty By Edward Cody The Wash

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France considers burqa ban, sparking debate over liberty By Edward Cody The Washington Post LYON, France — France, which regards itself as the cradle of human rights, is moving to impose legal restrictions on Muslim women who wear Afghan-style burqas or other full-face veils. The restrictions, likely to apply to many public places, come in response to resentment in France and other countries over the growing visibility of Muslims — immigrants or locally born — on a continent with ancient Christian roots. The tensions have long run through European societies but increasingly are coming to the surface as the number of Muslims grows and symbols of their faith, including mosques, are seen as a challenge to European traditions. André Gérin, a member of Parliament who recently completed six months of hearings on the burqa controversy, said he has nothing against the more than 5 million Muslims in France but full-face veils are the visible tip of an Islamist underground that threatens the French way of life. Although veiled women are estimated to number no more than several thousand in the country of 64 million, Gérin said, behind them are what he called "gurus" who are trying to impose Islamic law on French society. For instance, Gérin said, doctors at the Mother and Child Hospital in Lyon told him Thursday that they are threatened several times a week by angry Muslim men who refuse to allow their pregnant wives or daughters to be treated by male doctors, even for emergency births when nobody else is available. "The scope of the problem is a lot broader than I thought," he said at a news conference summing up his findings. "It is insidious." He said representatives of several other European countries and Canada have expressed interest in his hearings, which included testimony from women's advocacy figures, Muslim leaders and sociologists. Gérin, who also is mayor in the working-class Lyon suburb of Venissieux, said his parliamentary commission will present formal recommendations for legislation Jan. 26. The commission will probably urge a nonpartisan parliamentary resolution condemning full-face veils in principle, he said, to be followed by targeted decrees or laws banning veils in public facilities such as town halls, and then a general law prohibiting full veils in as many places as possible under the French constitution. As he described it, that law would bar fully veiled women from, for instance, walking down the Champs Élysées in Paris. "Our objective is not to stigmatize these women but to be clean, clear-cut and precise; the full-face veil has no place in France," he said. Women's advocacy groups, some of which include Muslim women, have strongly endorsed proposed legislation to ban the full-face veil on grounds it offends women's dignity and symbolizes oppression by men. But several young Muslim women interviewed by French journalists have said they wear the veil of their own accord to affirm adherence to a fundamentalist version of Islam. Some said they have been penalized for wearing it. Faiza Silmi, a Moroccan, married a Frenchman, has four French-born children and speaks French with only a trace of her native Arabic tongue. She contends her clothes — a head-to-toe robe and filmy tissue covering her face — are the reason France has denied her citizenship. "They say I'm too attached to my religion," said Silmi, 32. "Lots of Christians live in Morocco and we don't make them wear scarves." She acknowledged that she began veiling herself completely only after coming to France in 2000. She said she and her husband, Karim, discovered a deepening of their faith through books and cassette recordings. She was refused French citizenship for what authorities said was her failure to assimilate into French culture. But in each of three reports after interviews with Silmi, officials described her clothing. Her pro bono lawyer, Ronald Sokol, an American living in France, said that is what kept her from becoming a French citizen. Getting a jump on Gérin's commission, the leader of President Nicolas Sarkozy's parliamentary majority, Jean-François Cope, formally proposed last week a law banning full-face veils in any public place, including the streets. More than 200 members of Parliament backed his suggested legislation, he said. Defense Minister Hervé Morin, a centrist allied with Sarkozy, predicted such broad legislation would be unconstitutional. Moreover, he added, it could lead to embarrassing situations with foreigners, such as Persian Gulf billionaires who arrive in Paris with veiled wives. Sarkozy and his prime minister, François Fillon, responded to the clamor by saying they want Parliament first to approve a unanimous resolution declaring that the full-face veil is unacceptable in France. Then, they added in apparently coordinated statements, they will push for laws calibrated to ban the burqa as much as possible in public places without earning a rebuke from the Constitutional Council, the body that rules on constitutional issues. The legislation should be debated only after regional elections scheduled in March, they added, to keep it from being caught up in party politics. Critics, particularly in the opposition Socialist Party, have charged that much of Sarkozy's concern over the issue, including his organization of a "national identity debate," is designed to curry favor with right-wing voters. France's Muslim establishment, including the government-encouraged Muslim Religion Council, has declared that nothing in Islam requires women to wear full-face veils. At the same time, the council leader, Mohammed Moussaoui, has been reluctant to criticize women who wear a full veil and voiced fears that a legal ban would "stigmatize" Muslims in the same way he said they were stigmatized by a 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools. In addition to the restrictions on full veils, Gérin said, his commission will urge the government to hand down new guidance for doctors, teachers and mayors who have to deal with what he called "threats and violence" from fundamentalist Muslims. History or biology teachers frequently are challenged by fundamentalist adolescents whose religious beliefs are contradicted by what they hear in school, he said, and in some communities, half the girls in junior-high physical-education classes refuse to participate on religious grounds. "Their ideas are not in conformity with our society," he added. Summary of each article. What makes these articles strong? (Ex: based on comprehensive research-good references, strong/factual data...etc). What makes these articles weak? (Ex: weak argument, references not based on research.... etc) Conclusion: your opinion of article

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Answer:

The choice of person should be independent because if it is a democratic country then it should allow woemen to wear whatever they want. Not only Burqa, but any other dress because it also represent the restriction over feminism in a way. Next thing, any culture of religion does not get affected by only the way of dressing sense because religion are by choice not by force. Therefore, anyone cannot feel insecure their religion by such type of things because its individual choice to accept or not. For example; If some women or girl chose Islam, its her choice because she already knew the good and bad things of that religion, only by knowing she accepted it. Hence, no one can blame or force her choice, likewise that the person's dressing sense are the choice made by himself therefore it should not be force by anyother person to change.

All the given cases represents the some type restriction made by the government or some agencies over the choices of individual person, however due to this the person also got some negative results in their day to day life.

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