If modern day Druids decided to stop poncing about in bedsheets pretending they are in Victorian paintings, and started trying to emulate what little we do know of the real historical Druids, they would start sacrificing people by drowning them. This would be a matter for the criminal law, though, not a crisis of secularism.
If a town in Yorkshire were colonised by the descendants of Aztecs, and they started ripping the still-beating hearts from the chests of virgins in the Old Market Square, we wouldn’t be facing a crisis of secularism. It would be a matter for the criminal law.
If enclaves were established in European towns and cities, in which women were not educated, were treated as slaves and chattels, sold to men, forbidden social interaction, held powerless, beaten, raped and sometimes killed – even if these things were done in the name of a religion – it would not be a crisis of secularism. It would be a matter for the criminal law.
As Nicolas Sarkozy said, “The problem of the burka is not a religious problem, it’s a problem of liberty and women’s dignity. It’s not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we can’t accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.”
Sometimes freedoms conflict. Where it is a voluntary act, the right to wear a burka is comparable to one of two things: the right to walk around in full bondage gear complete with dog collar and leash, or the right to walk around wearing a full Nazi uniform, complete with swastika armband.
Neither type of right trumps the imperative of eliminating slavery from our cities.
Ross was right about what secularism is, which is why I quoted a short extract from one of his posts. Sarkozy is right about the burka.
Incidentally, what isn’t challenged enough is the question of some Asian male attitudes. If members of the Ku Klux Klan started threatening and attacking white women who went out with or wanted to marry men from other ethnic backgrounds, we’d have a front-page headline campaign from the Guardian and the BBC. It’s no different when Asian men behave in a comparable way.
UPDATE: Credit where it is due: given that I’m implicitly critical of them in this post, it’s good of someone at the BBC to link to it from the Reaction from around the Web section of the Today Programme website. (The link will disappear pretty soon, of course).
