The town council of Lérida in northern Spain has become the first in that country to ban the veil. In a motion passed Friday, the council voted to prohibit the "use of the veil and other clothes and accessories which cover the face and prevent identification in buildings and installations of the town hall".
About 20 per cent of the population of the Catalan town are foreign-born; of those, about a third are Maghrabis from North Africa, mainly Morocco.
The veil has led to debate in many European countries: Belgian deputies last month backed a draft law banning the garment in all public places, including on the streets, while France's cabinet has approved a draft law to ban the full-face veil from public spaces. The bill goes before the French parliament in July.
There are reasonable "civic" grounds for asking Muslims not to wear the full-face veil when teaching or engaged in jobs where it is seeing the face is important.
But the grounds cited by the the mayor of Lérida are ideological.
"It's a question of rights and liberties, a question of the right to equality of men and women", said Àngel Ros. "Today we did not debate religious or even cultural matters".
(Spanish-speakers can watch an interview with him here.)
This decision, like the French one, assumes that that the burka somehow denigrates women. There is no evidence for that. Like those anticlerical governments which closed convents on the grounds that nuns needed liberating, the Spanish town council of Lerida has demonstrated ignorance and secularist bias.
Seeing the face is always important. Otherwise how can you have a social life at all? How can you recognise or interact with friends or strangers that you meet when you are out? How can you even eat or drink or talk? How can you get vitamin D?
Allowing the burqa would be racist, since it gives Arab women less rights than white women.
Though they were not Muslim, they did this willingly out of respect for the culture, and because they did not want to cause any ill will or trouble.
I am a firm believer in separation of Church and State. A state should not be able to dictate how anyone worships or expresses their religious convictions within their own places of worship.
However this seems to be a cultural matter, rather than a religious one, and one should respect and adhere to the customs of the prevailing culture. In Western countries, women do not cover their faces in public.
Nor should a specific Church be able to dictate the custome of a culture which consists of many different religious Faiths.