Vive La Belle France!

A new law came into effect this week in la belle France, a law passed last year by an overwhelming majority in the French parliament to ban the wearing in public of the burqa and niqab. The burqa covers the entire face, while the niqab covers everything but the eyes. President Nicolas Sarkozy has quite rightly referred to the burqa as "a sign of enslavement and debasement."
The only place left now for a woman to wear such debasing garments is in the privacy of her own home. Wearing them anywhere else can result in the offenders facing a maximum fine of €150 (about $190) and/or being asked to attend courses on what the government calls "republican values." Individuals who encourage others to ignore the ban would face the more stringent penalties of up to one year in prison and a maximum fine of €30,000. The ban applies to everyone in France, including visitors.
Of course, one response has been many a self-righteous Muslim male calling for violent retribution to be visited on France. The even more disturbing response, however, has come from those Muslim women who have actually protested the law.
Their sad protests against a law that seeks to undermine the debasement of their gender puts me in mind of a passage penned by Terry Pratchett in his novel "Interesting Times". The story is largely set in the fictional Hunghung, a locale where peasants stand quiescent, passively waiting for their overlords to visit aberrant forms of justice on them in whatever violent fashion takes their fancy. A main character in the story, seeing that this scene takes place again and again, even though the overlords do not whip the peasants into submission is puzzled. He ponders the peasants' unquestioning acceptance of such subjugation until he arrives at an understanding of how the Empire has achieved that end. "The Empire's got something worse than whips all right," he thinks. "It's got obedience. Whips in the soul." (emphasis my own) That's exactly what the militant misogyny of those Muslim males who expect their women to wear such demeaning garments has achieved. It has hardwired whips right into the souls of those women. Any woman who protests losing her supposed right to wear these blatant symbols of militant misogyny has got whips in her poor, pathetic soul.