There are other safety hazards, so we shouldn't ban any of them, including the most obvious and dangerous. That's your argument?

Perhaps I could introduce you to the Wingnut. His arguments are frequently similarly-based.

Finally, someone says it! How about listening to the robust debate on the issue among female Muslim academics and scholars before holding forth about this complex issue? But no, surely "female Muslim scholars" must be an oxymoron, as we are all victims of the Stockholm Syndrome.

I'm a Muslim woman who chooses to wear the hijab ("scarf" in modern parlance). I'm also a graduate of a top-10 U.S. law school. I'm also someone who chose to wear it, much to the horror of my mother, who does not. My father was hand-off about it, as is my husband now, and my brother actively tried to discourage me from wearing it (so much for all Muslim men as "oppressive"). I've been wearing it for the past 11 years. And yes, at times it gets hot and annoying, and its not always fun to stand out in a crowd, especially at a law firm, but I do it as a sign of my spiritual devotion, and as a check against superficiality and vanity (among many other reasons). I am so happy to live in the United States, where I have the choice to wear it or not, as opposed to Saudi Arabia where I would be forced to, or France, where I couldn't go to a public high school wearing it as I did here. I'm also happy to have non-Muslim friends who don't try to take my agency away by assuming I must be brainwashed. We have interesting discussions.

I have to admit that the burka unnerves me as well, but as a liberal, how can I argue that government has the right to police women's bodies? Whither, pro-choice? Some of my cousins-in-law wear burka, and decided to wear it before they were married, AGAINST the will of the men in their families. They were born, educated, and brought up in the U.S. It is not so difficult to imagine that many many intelligent women choose to wear hijab/burka/long sleeves/long skirts etc for their own personal reasons. Try talking to us sometime.

Any society needs the immigrants to be assimilated. Only Western culture tries to define assimilation as a bad thing. Every other culture want (and sometimes forces) foreigners to assimilate.

This does not mean that they have to change their religion or to be a clone of their neighbors. But this does mean that you must accept the basic values of the society. For example, in the Western world, democracy, human rights, freedom, tolerance and gender equality. You accept the law and the rules of your country. You accept the language as one of your languages. Nothing more but nothing less. Sometimes this takes a generation but it is eventually done.

This is not bad: is good so you end up with an unified country instead of communities fighting with each other. As an European citizen, I admire America for having done that. America has been successful because immigrants have assimilated. There are no German, Norwegian, Irish or Italian: they are American. Of course, Norwegian can preserve their pristine culture in Norway but, once they are American, they must assimilate.

You don't assimilate and you end up with a society like the ancient Yugoslavia: a patchwork of different ethnicities angered to each other. There were Serbs in Macedonia: their families have been centuries living in Macedonia, but they were not Macedonian: they were Serbs because they were unwilling to assimilate. The grievances accumulated between both communities were deep and the anger was big. Who needs that?

In Europe, Muslim people who are not assimilated are demanding to be judged by the shari'a, the Islamic law, where a female witness is worth a half of a male witness. This is not assimilation. If they want to do it in their countries, it is another thing. But every immigrant should be assimilated.

My great-grandmother was born in 1899. For her entire childhood and the beginning of her young adult life, grown women wore ankle-length skirts. This was the standard of modesty to which she was accustomed, and she wasn't comfortable exposing more of her body. (Just like how it's common to sunbathe topless on some European beaches, but not all of us North Americans would be comfortable removing our bathing suit top even if everyone else was doing it.)

When hemlines rose in the 1920s, she continued to wear ankle-length skirts. When knee-length became standard and not at all scandalous in the 1940s, she continued to wear ankle-length skirts. When pants became common casual wear for women, when her granddaughters were running around in miniskirts, she continued to wear ankle-length skirts. Even those all these evolutions in fashion are considered progress for women in general, my great-grandmother as an individual would have felt overexposed showing that much of her body. So she happily wore ankle-length skirts until the day she died at the age of 103, making them herself when she couldn't find anything suitable in stores. She left behind dozens of descendents of various generations, all of whom would have felt oppressed if forced to wear ankle length skirts all the time. However, she didn't find it at all oppressive, and in fact would have felt humiliated if forced to expose her legs in public, the same way many of us would feel humiliated if forced to expose our breasts.

I'm thinking that a woman who has grown up accustomed to wearing a burqa in public might feel the same way about it. She's used to a certain standard of modesty in public. She's used to not having to expose her hair or face or body shape to randoms. To forbid her from covering herself as much as she is comfortable with would be just as cruel as forcing my great-grandmother to walk around in public with her legs showing.

But reading the comments here, it seems like it's too much to ask that before bloviating on what Muslim women think, how they feel, and what they should or shouldn't do, outsiders should go and listen to what Muslim feminists have to say about various forms of veiling.

Listening to women talk about their own experience is, apparently, irrelevant to the process of deciding what is good for women.