USA TODAY International Edition
Burkini fashion police take liberties in France
The specter of French police patrolling beaches — and ordering women to remove their demure swimwear or leave — raised a lot of eyebrows last week. It also raised a provocative question: How is France, with its national commitment to secularism, any different from Saudi Arabia, with its national religion of Islam?
In Saudi Arabia, as in France, officials have been known to patrol public spaces sanctioning women for their attire. And in Saudi Arabia, as in France, officials justify their actions based on an overarching national cause.
France’s secularism is not a state religion. But when it reaches the point of police officers telling women what to wear and not to wear, it becomes a form of suppression of individual liberties by an overweening state.
A top French court did a real favor for the nation’s image Friday when it struck down one town’s ban on burkinis, the fulllength swimsuits designed for Muslim women. The ruling doesn’t immediately affect similar bans in 30 other cities, including Nice, the nation’s fifth- largest city and the site of last month’s Bastille Day terror attack in which 86 have died. But it sets a clear precedent that will make it hard for other cities to continue.
Here at home, the two religion clauses of the First Amendment — one prohibiting government from recognizing an establishment of religion, and another preventing it from interfering with free exercise of religion — can be cumbersome and sometimes contradictory. Lawyers and judges have struggled with how to accommodate displays of faith in public settings without their accommodations constituting a recognition. The Supreme Court has had to rule several times on such issues as nativity scenes at city hall, Bible study groups at public schools and prayers at graduation ceremonies.
Yet for all its contradictions, the U. S. approach is far better than trying to enforce secularism in public places while allowing people to worship as they please in private. In America, the government does not require people of faith to pretend to be something they are not. And it assumes that they can observe their own religion while being respectful of other faiths.
The French approach is clearly driven by peoples’ fears about terrorism and their apprehension over the growing number of Muslims in the country. The burkini bans have been adopted in the wake of the attack in Nice and one in Paris last November, and five years into a national ban on face- covering burqas in public places. That ban, if anything, has backfired, causing civil rights groups to encourage burqas as a form of protest.
The mayor of Cannes justified his ban on the grounds that the burkini is a “symbol of Islamic extremism” that is “not respectful of good morals and secularism.” If a full- length suit covering everything but the hands, face and feet does not show good morals, then scuba divers should be worried. And if clothing associated with a particular religion is not secular enough, then surely it is also time to ban the religious habits of Catholic nuns.
It is time for France to get rid of its ridiculous burkini bans, and hopefully Friday’s court ruling will help sweep them out to sea.