The Diocesan Council of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal expresses its grave concern about Bill 94, recently introduced by the Government of Quebec to prohibit the wearing of the niqab or other face-covering religious garb by members of the public who are seeking government services.
The Bill represents an erosion of the human rights guaranteed by both the Quebec and Canadian Charters of Rights and by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Too bad they don’t express such compassionate concern for Canadian and American Orthodox Anglicans and Episcopalians who are being shoved out the doors of their own churches.
Members of the public seeking government services surely should identify themselves to the government officials they approach. People, women included, in Western societies do not go around in public with their faces covered except in extreme weather. The wearing of the niqab is always dehumanizing to the woman and culturally insensitive to the society in which she lives unless she’s in a strict Islamist country.
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Katherine–It is degrading and dehumanizing even in a strict Islamist country.
Thought I wrote my comment to say that, David Keller, but I agree. I can handle the hijab on Muslim women, the wig on Orthodox Jewish women, the lace cap on Mennonites, and so on. But a woman without a face is made to be subhuman. She is a form, not a person.
Hokay, [i]mes amis[/i], I lived in Québec for thirteen years and am usually mistaken for a native speaker of the local [i]patois[/i].
Québec has a monumental problem they don’t quite understand. I saw it in my own sons nearly a generation ago. Law 101 requires that all immigrants not educated in English in Canada send their children to school in French. Québecois like to think of themselves as [i]pure laine[/i] — pure wool — and between 1880 and 1960 their child production rate closely approached the theoretical maximum for our species.
Since that time, birth rates have crashed to well under half the natural replacement rate. The problem is this: you can force immigrants into French language schools, but they don’t [i]THINK[/i] like Québecois. The niqab is now a part of that issue, just like my sons who speak French as their best language are part of that issue, because they don’t think like Québecois.
Québec cannot keep both its [i]pure laine[/i] culture and its language, for the simple reason that they’ve stopped having babies. This is a common problem in intrusive socialist societies.
That said, even Québecois have a limit. You cannot hide behind your Ù†Ùقاب and pretend to belong. You [i]should not[/i] claim functional anonymity on the basis of “religious” choice.
I fully support Québec’s decision. Live reasonably like a North American, and if you don’t like it, go the #3|| back to where you came from. You want to wear your Ù†Ùقاب ? Go back to Morocco.
If you really love the thing that much, you could even move to Iran.