{"id":494,"date":"2010-04-16T23:28:17","date_gmt":"2010-04-17T03:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/?p=494"},"modified":"2010-04-16T23:28:17","modified_gmt":"2010-04-17T03:28:17","slug":"the-burqa-and-the-public-blanket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/2010\/04\/16\/the-burqa-and-the-public-blanket\/","title":{"rendered":"The Burqa and The Public Blanket"},"content":{"rendered":"

I boarded a subway earlier this week with a friend and saw\u00a0a surprising sight: someone sitting in a corner seat with a blanket covering\u00a0(her?) body.<\/p>\n

I remarked to my friend that that was a lot like a burqa, and that if burqas are banned, why not blankets covering public sleepers?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I came to this article<\/a> in today’s news talking about the banning of the burqa.\u00a0 I hadn’t heard the different reasons that different countries were interested in banning the clothing.\u00a0 This passage will clue you in to some of those reasons:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

French President Nicolas Sarkozy favors a burqa ban, saying the veils compromise women’s dignity. Unlike the Belgians or the Dutch \u2014 who see a clear and straightforward public security issue \u2014 the French are struggling with the constitutionality of outlawing a religious dress code.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess I’d only heard the security argument and not the indignity argument.\u00a0 While on the surface the practice of wearing a burqa seems to me\u00a0to be an undignified thing, as yet I don’t know the reasoning behind wearing the clothing so I can’t give an educated opinion, nor can I comment on the legality of promoting indignity.\u00a0 I can comment more on the security argument, and it seems to me that if wearing a burqa can necessitate arrest on the grounds of creating a security threat, so should donning the hiding blanket for the (woman?) on the subway.<\/p>\n

And in considering the nature of the security threat, not only that, ban any<\/em> covering in public.\u00a0 What is a tent, then?\u00a0 Might large sunglasses obfuscate identity in a problematic way?\u00a0 What about security in Prince’s entourage, who purportedly tower over him as to make him unseen?\u00a0 When I’m wearing a big pashmina scarf on a cold day, am I committing a crime?\u00a0 Does my rather helpful ski mask criminalize my need for facial warmth\u00a0when skiing down slopes or biking down streets?\u00a0 When I wear clown makeup, do I send fear into the hearts and minds of the CIA?<\/p>\n

The security notion strikes me as brazen cultural\u00a0discrimination based on fear and ignorance.\u00a0 The burqa is\u00a0a covering\u00a0with holes for eyes; so is many a Halloween costume.\u00a0 A burqa is fabric that reveals the eyes; a blanket doesn’t have eyes, so it is more concealing.\u00a0 Don’t we have some potential hypocrises here if the U.S. government develops a semantic reaction to burqas similar to\u00a0the reactions\u00a0of the other banning nations?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A lot of different cultures and heritages are represented in my neighborhood.\u00a0 I see a few burqas here and there, and while they surprise me a little bit, it’s only because they are unusual, and after seeing a person wearing one, my thinking usually shifts to “Treat this person just as I would any other person–with a sense of humor.”\u00a0 Granted, to date I’ve never interacted with a woman wearing a burqa, so I don’t know if those are wise actions.\u00a0 Apparently to the governments of some nations, underneath these items of clothing could be an assassin, so in these countries I should maybe feign threat.<\/p>\n

But what I don’t see are people walking down the street in ski masks.\u00a0 Those are probably more shocking to me than burqas.\u00a0 And I have to calm myself down the moment I see them.\u00a0 Methinks part of the fun of wearing a ski mask is the shock it generates in other people.<\/p>\n

The subway sleeper probably wanted to create (her?) own bit of security.\u00a0 If so, was\u00a0the public blanket\u00a0a security threat, or a security boon?<\/p>\n

It depends on the motives.\u00a0 The meaning, as we remember, lies in the person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I boarded a subway earlier this week with a friend and saw\u00a0a surprising sight: someone sitting in a corner seat with a blanket covering\u00a0(her?) body. I remarked to my friend that that was a lot like a burqa, and that if burqas are banned, why not blankets covering public sleepers? * I came to this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,55,58,57],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-blankets","tag-burqas","tag-security","tag-semantic-reaction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":520,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}