NDP WANTS IT BOTH WAYS ON NIQABS (AND ALL ELSE)

Apparently NDP leadership contenders are having fits trying to find a comfortable stand on Quebec’s Bill 62 to ban face coverings while providing or receiving public services. In my view they are far from alone.

On Monday my colleague Chris Selley reproached MP Niki Ashton for telling Huffington Post “there is no justification where a government should tell a woman, or anyone, what they should wear and what they shouldn’t wear.” She then performed a sharp U-turn and added, “That being said, there is a consensus in Quebec’s political leaders emerging on secularism, and the Canadian government should respect the will of Quebecers on this matter.”

Selley called her reliance on Quebec’s secularism “hopelessly transparent rubbish” since, in a province with a prominent crucifix in the National Assembly, Bill 62 is only about the niqab, worn only by Muslims. But before declaring any statement gibberish we should rotate it about in our minds until we find an angle from which it is at least coherently wrong.

So let me offer this qualified defence: Ashton and her collectivist party consistently believe in people’s right to do what they should want, not what they actually want, which could including refusing to photograph a gay wedding to working for less than a legislated hourly minimum to tolerating niqabs to removing them. But there’s more to it.

My colleague Barbara Kay on Wednesday offered a simple principled solution: niqabs are not like other garments because covering the face is not like covering, say, the hair, which Bill 62 does not target. (As I wrote years ago, face-covering is socially hyper-aggressive, associated with bank robbers and the KKK.) But Kay went further, saying we “do not permit public nakedness because we are not animals. We should not permit full cover because we are not things.” If only it were true. I don’t mean I personally doubt that humans are neither animals nor things, or rather, are not just animals or things. Obviously we are animals; we eat, sleep and have various other biological functions I need not spell out. And obviously we are things; our bodies are made of meat, bone, and other grisly stuff, and merely physical processes from skewering to crushing can put an end to our hopes and dreams as well as to our breathing, sweating, etc. insist that those patterns, including those we mistake for moral sense and free will, are mathematically determined by physical laws, so if at a given moment various particles are in certain places with certain velocities and electrical charges, what happens in the next moment is uniquely and inexorably determined by that configuration, and on to infinity and also relentlessly backward through all the moments to the Big Bang?

If so we are not moral agents, just animals, and in being just animals just things, mechanical and pointless. It seems a contradiction that materialists argue passionately for the “truth” that their own thoughts are just a trick of the genes, unreliable, deterministic evolutionary adaptations unrelated to any objective standard of correctness, which we could not discover even if it existed, which it can’t anyway.

Until you realize from their point of view, it’s not that they want to think things they don’t think, or argue for them. It’s that they have, literally, no choice. You’re arguing with their DNA, not with them. They aren’t participants in their own mental processes, just helpless observers, ghosts in machines, C.S. Lewis’s men claiming they are not there.

What has all this to do with niqabs? Very simply, if we do not see humans as more than animals and thus as more than things, we cannot treat their individual desires or identities as important. They become at best objects for benevolent manipulation as members of groups. Hence identity politics. But if a woman can be ordered to uncover her face through “consensus,” why can’t she be ordered to cover it the same way?

It’s not a comfortable position, politically or morally. But as J. Budziszewski says, people are logical, slowly. And if we are not more than animals and things, it’s very hard to believe we have rights. Or defend them coherently.