This is why I am 100% for burqa bans and (mostly) for hijab bans as well. Liberals like to pretend that symbols don’t convey meaning, don’t express an ideology, don’t have any relevance except to and for the individual . Alas, however, that is all balderedash and we live in a world of warring symbols and interpretations that tell us what sort of people to be and what sort of civilization we should uphold as an ideal and as a practice.

The reason huge majorities of people of all faiths and genders all over Europe tell pollsters they want the burqa off their streets is that it affects all modern egalitarian civic-minded human beings. It is most damaging to girls and young women, who grow up witnessing the most graphic exposure of — not the inferiority, but the nothingness of women, every day of their lives as they walk the streets of their cities.

Yes. If the burqa only affected those who chose to be constrained by it, so be it. However, it goes well beyond that. The doctrine of neoliberalism insists we are all atomistic individuals, completely disconnected consumption units, and the liberal disavowal of societal imperatives in the name of “voluntary” enslavement and subjugation to support individual “rights” is therefore nothing but neoliberal ventriloquism.

Western societies and burqas are incompatible — and if they are not, they should be.

That is a great post, and said in few words why burqas and hijabs (etc.) are so harmful to everyone — not just those directly subjugated by them.