A Woman's Right to Choose Her Clothing

Currently, women throughout America enjoy the right to dress as they wish, given some limitations, under the law.Muslim women in America also have that right.

Therefore, it is their choice to dress as they please. If a Muslim woman choses to remove her veil that is her decision. If she decides to keep it on because she believes, and this is the point that all those who've commented thus far have missed, that she is following her religion by only allowing her husband, blood relatives and other women see her face, then she is making her choice.

It is not the place of non-Muslims to say what Muslim women can and cannot wear. Muslim women are not going around demanding that bikini clad women on beaches cover themselves, are they?

When you are a member of a particular religion you have the right to speak on its behalf because you believe in its doctrine, no matter how you interpret its teachings.

When you're outside of the religion you don't have that right because you neither believe in it nor understand its doctrine.

Someone who is illiterate can run around calling people to illiteracy because he/she feels its the key to happiness. But what does he/she know about the literate person? Nothing.

In conclusion, there are women who feel it is perfectly normal to wear a bikini on the beach. They were born and raised that way. And there are women who would never be caught dead in a bikini. They were born and raised that way.

Forcing women or men to dress a certain way in America is currently against the law. Therefore either the law would have to be changed or deport all Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Nuns, Priests, Rabbis and anyone else who doesn't live up to the "ideal" dress code and life would be "perfectly homogeneous".

Western imperialism has many faces...

Currently, women throughout America enjoy the right to dress as they wish, given some limitations, under the law.Muslim women in America also have that right.

Therefore, it is their choice to dress as they please. If a Muslim woman choses to remove her veil that is her decision. If she decides to keep it on because she believes, and this is the point that all those who've commented thus far have missed, that she is following her religion by only allowing her husband, blood relatives and other women see her face, then she is making her choice.

It is not the place of non-Muslims to say what Muslim women can and cannot wear. Muslim women are not going around demanding that bikini clad women on beaches cover themselves, are they?

When you are a member of a particular religion you have the right to speak on its behalf because you believe in its doctrine, no matter how you interpret its teachings.

When you're outside of the religion you don't have that right because you neither believe in it nor understand its doctrine.

Someone who is illiterate can run around calling people to illiteracy because he/she feels its the key to happiness. But what does he/she know about the literate person? Nothing.

In conclusion, there are women who feel it is perfectly normal to wear a bikini on the beach. They were born and raised that way. And there are women who would never be caught dead in a bikini. They were born and raised that way.

Forcing women or men to dress a certain way in America is currently against the law. Therefore either the law would have to be changed or deport all Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Nuns, Priests, Rabbis and anyone else who doesn't live up to the "ideal" dress code and life would be "perfectly homogeneous".

Western imperialism has many faces...

"Oh, what a precious reasoning...you are too much...why not start wearing your own burka today in solidarity? Go ahead, I'm waiting..."

My husband doesn't wear a yarmulke or a turban, but we support the right of our male Jewish and Sikh friends to do so. I do choose to wear pants quite often, but I support the right of Amish and Christian fundamentalist women not to do so. I do not wear a wig or kerchief over a shaved head, nor do I wear a hijab or a burka - but I support the right of others to do so.

Why must I participate in a particular custom in order to accept that other people may choose to do so, and that that is their right?

"Surely, you are far to intelligent to believe that a woman who wears a burka has chosen to wear it."

I see fundamentalist Christian women turning themselves into brood mares, having child after child with no room for anything but constant breeding and rearing in their lives, because of their religion. I see other women, and men, choosing to endure loveless marriages of convenience because their religion forbids them to love the person they are biologically inclined to love, and urges them to marry nonetheless and produce children. I see Amish people choosing not to use even the most basic of modern conveniences, of their own free will, because their religion tells them their simple ways are best. I see men having pieces of their son's penises cut off because their religion demands it. I see many, many Christians of all kinds and sects engaging in ritual cannibalism every Sunday because they believe that eating God's body and drinking his blood will bring them closer to him. (All of these choices, by the way, are Constitutionally protected, and I favor government bans on none of them.)

Why should it be so impossible that a woman should willingly choose to wear a burka, if she has been taught since childhood that that is what virtuous women of her faith do? (And taught not just by the men in her family, but by the women too.)

In America, adult women cannot be forced, by government or fathers or husbands, to wear burkas in public if they don't want to. If their fathers or husbands use force to require them to do so, then that is abuse, which is illegal, and the women need legal help and support to protect them and enable them to escape such abuse. But if a woman chooses to participate in this custom, that is her right, as surely as it is an Amish woman's right to wear a cap and long dress, or a Jewish woman's right to shave her head and wear a wig or a kerchief, or a Sikh man's right to wear a turban.

I mean, we kinda come partway, if we want to get along in a free society... Look at what the Sikhs go through all the time.

Oh, what a precious reasoning...you are too much...why not start wearing your own burka today in solidarity? Go ahead, I'm waiting...

I mean, hearing all this talk, that's the line. I don't think it's a bad line. Show. Your. Face. We're free individuals, not particularly smart drapery racks.

I'd cover my hair if I went to Arabia, at least in token, (I mean, they've been croaking people for alleged 'witchcraft' over there, I may just give it a miss entirely, actually) ...Muslims who want to claim their piece of American (Or French) pie need to come a *little* ways on this.

In *public schools,* the government does not have to enable parents or communities do force their children to be faceless, as though the state approves.

This is basic to human communication and interaction.

Your face.

Your social personhood.

Someplace has to be safe from religious authorities.

If people want to put a bag on their heads when they're adult citizens, that's a separate matter.

Free societies are under no obligation to enable or endorse this coercion of young women to *be interchangeable, faceless, dehumanized bodies.*

I'm not fussed about wearing traditional garb. As religious expression or culture or whatever. But. You can't expect a free society to let *any* religion take a young citizen's *face* be taken away before they even *can* make decisions as free adults.

Surely, you are far to intelligent to believe that a woman who wears a burka has chosen to wear it.Your endorsement of apartheid for Islamic women is callous and caries brutal consequences. These are women who are and will be killed without mercy if they disobey their fathers or brothers or uncles plans for their lives. Countless Mujslim women are strangled, stoned or beheaded for daring to reach out for a normal life and the right to decide what to believe, what to wear, whether to marry and to whom they wil be married. They are religious slaves.
Your arguments concerning choice are specious and make me wonder at your humanity.Do the thousands of Muslim little girls who are brutalized by having their clitoris cut off so that they can be regarded as pure "choose" it? Do you support their right to "choose"? And the women who are brutalized and beaten and then hidden behind burkas, is it a blow for freedom that you champion this spurious right to choose?
The anti-woman culture and religion of Islam has been exposed for what it is and by the President of France. Would you champion a white European woman's "right" to be subjugatd and oppressed? I don't think you would. Muslim women are due the same respect. They are in fear of their lives if they dare to break out of the all encompasing slavery of Islam, and comments like yours tighten the noose.
Bravo Sarkozy! Thank you for preserving the dignity of Muslim women and all women by refusing to call evil good, and to pretend that a badge of slavery is freedom.

I think the discussion is about using burka in an western country like France or US. If a woman refuses to use a burka in some muslim places,she will get beaten or murdered. If a woman refuses to wear a burka in a western country, she will be shown by the media as an example, until she tries to get in touch again with her husband and family, that surely will ostracize her, or beat or just kill her.
No, I can not accept that kind of garment. It is like an uniform that says " I am a female of the species without any rigths and less value than cattle"

Dear Lisa Miller,

*A Woman 's Right to Choose her clothing*
Yes,correct.But;
Does a woman choose or anyone enforce her to wear burqa ? It is the Problem.
Or,in other words,does a muslim woman(under sharia and family rules) have right to choose how to dress.
Does a muslim girl have right to say *No* or *Yes* to anything.If you have no right to choose,*Right to Choose*,as you write,is not meaningful.

These women have been brainwashed since birth that they are nobodies - therefore they should be kept under wraps and be invisible. These women don't make choices in their lives - they're made for them. All women should be outraged.

At a Halloween party I went to, oh, say 8 years ago, a woman came wearing a burqa as a "costume". I thought that was the height of extremely poor taste, but nobody ever accused Anita of being terribly intelligent.