Great piece, I'm still getting used to the tragedy of my "not a kid anymore" box. However, I would argue that the political hydra that squats on our throne has been attempting to redefine the moderate conservative box for everybody in order to avoid ever acknowledging that it was never in that box to begin with.

I think you're doing Mike Pace a disservice. When he said that he'd be "getting my hands dirty like a man" he clearly meant he'd be eating Cheetos on the couch. Because he wants to help "piss of the Islamists" with his excess consumption as much as we do, right? I mean, he wouldn't want to... let's says... appease the Islamists? Would he?

Last I checked Tae kwan doe was a martial art. It is kind of a kicky one, but still something that involves strikes, holds and throws. A head scarf might be dangerous for an opponent during a match but the bigger danger would be that the girl wearing the head scarf would in some way be inadvertently choked by it. I'd be more interested in what Tae kwan doe competitions in other areas do when facing this controversy. I'd expect they'd want to encourage as many communities as possible to participate in their sport, though that obviously runs up against the international rules, cries of a double standard and, probably most importantly, their own liability concerns.

Your analogy is flawed. Kamiya's sentence isn't specious at all. He doesn't imply that she hates Islam, just that she's upset at its conservatism. Wondering how she could believe in the dogma of any institutionalized religion is reasonable given her issues with her own. She seems to want Islam to be something it never has been before, something that it unlikely ever will be. User feedback generally isn't part of determining the core "truths" of a religion. Certainly not when the original instruction manual is considered too holy to update.

However your new sentence certainly is specious. I'm not saying it hasn't been uttered/typed/spewed, just that it's loathsome and flat out wrong. Moveon's members' statements are less critical of their country than of those who are running the country and the actions they are taking. Moveon's members seem to want America to be something it was before, at least in some ways, and something that it definitely could be in the future, because they will help determine that future. Strangely, in our disheveled democratic republic, user feedback is a big part of determining what America is and what it should be.

I wonder if they have any affect on wind resistance (just like the full body swimsuits reduced water "resistance", drag, whatever) and if so how long it will be before all female competitors regardless of religion, and then male competitors start wearing them.

I don't think I misread you. I never thought nor suggested that your second sentence was anything other than a way to illustrate your point. I just thought that your point was wrong and your attempted analogy a failure.

You however seemed to have skipped over my first paragraph where I tried to indicate why I thought you were wrong in making that inference from Kamiya's piece.

This whole thing is now ridiculously referential.

I appreciate the theme of the piece but maybe you didn't get the memo, Hiss was just exonerated.

Or at least possibly exonerated. So he probably wasn't a witch. Because witches aren't real. And neither was anything McCarthy said about communism and his lists. And thinking that the democratic party's "reputation" for appeasement is the fault of those who tried to stand up to McCarthy and Nixon's attempted pogrom is ridiculous.

Or is this "satire" again?

I thought it was Hiss that was just "exonerated", but now I can't seem to find the news piece. I heart irony.

I understand that this is a government rule on a state-run network, which is a different than our own privately-run network setup, but how many of our news anchors are allowed to wear explicitly religious accessories while reporting the news? While Muslims make up the majority of the Egyptian population, Islam certainly isn't the only religion in town. And while Egypt is a democracy in name only, it is a secular government. Having hijab-wearing news anchoring on state TV would be tantamount to endorsing one religion over the others. Maybe they don't have those types of concerns over there, but before saying "who would it hurt" consider what the news would be like here if all the anchors looked like they had come straight from the 700 club, or if the anchors in Italy all wore habits.

Of course it could just be that the state-run TV station is like private stations and prefers their anchors with big hair to appeal to consumers.

This reminds in some ways of the pharmacist controversy about whether or not they would be forced to fill prescriptions for the morning after pill. Both jobs are pretty clearly defined, they're serving the entire public, and the morals of the people performing those jobs shouldn't override their responsibilities.

I think the point is that a U.S. news station would never a hire a nun if she insisted on wearing her religious outfit while reporting the news. In my mind it would be even less defensible for the talking head of an ostensibly secular government to ever wear religious garb. But the nun/habit issue doesn't really line up with the hijab issue, given that a nun in some sense is a position of authority, and I regret introducing that analogy.

Now I prepare to duck... how exactly is following a millennial old religious rule only for women, a rule which is followed by a large majority of your country's population, in any way a feminist choice? It seems to be the epitome of not making a choice.

I'm going to go off in a corner now to excoriate myself before the sky falls on me.