'Burqa ban' and the concept of a free country

By Kat


Following the ISIS threat in the Middle East, Tony Abbott has raised the terror alert to high and then went on a rampage to state that he finds the burqa 'confronting', and 'frankly [wishes] it were not worn'.
Now there are multiple sides to this argument. There are people like Jacqui Lambie, who in her ranting proposed that the burqa poses a security threat because you can, supposedly, never see who (or what) is underneath the burqa. She then proposed a string of questions involving a concern about the gender of the individual wearing the burqa. The Muslim woman she was debating with was laughing by the end.
There's people like Andrew Bolt, who choose to acknowledge the 'confronting nature' of the burqa as a symbol of oppression and a shame to a country that practises freedom of expression and interaction.
And then there's logical people, like Dr Ghena Krayem and Dr Helen McCue, who write that the government lack the ability to make choices towards social cohesion, and the recent arguments against the burqa that have shifted to security concerns are unfounded.
Read it here:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-02/krayem-mccue-the-burqa-ban-call-only-creates-division/5785318
Firstly, let's just dismiss the security threat argument, because that doesn't need to come into play here. Clearly, if one were to be worried about identification, Muslim women are not immune to simply raising their headscarfs, as written in the aforementioned article. The idea of such attire being a security threat is largely unfounded- many other forms of clothing that are far more common than the burqa can mimic the way in which the burqa is seen to be worn- in a baggy fashion. The idea of any kind of threat is simply paranoia- for this is just a form of discrimination. People don't need to wear the burqa to conceal things within their clothing, and even so, how many Australians actually choose to wear the burqa in the first place?
The substantial point here, in my opinion, is its description as oppressive to women in a society. Some people may consider it to be a symbol of inferiority as well as a woman being shrouded and shielded away from societal interaction- and while it is true that the older roots of the dress do have such connotations, it doesn't matter to the issue of the ban, because in the end, we all have a right to believe in what we want and practise religious freedom and personal freedom of choice over the freedom that society inflicts. Perhaps the burqa is unusual and subject of scorn, but in the end, it's their choice, and there is no reason why it should be banned altogether.
Very few people actually wear the burqa, rather, they simply choose variations of the Muslim headwear. Furthermore, the people who do wear it wear it out of choice, not because they are subject of oppression. Though we can have our criticisms for this minority group, we all have to learn the value of respect for other peoples' beliefs, lifestyles and choices.