Lleida Is First Spanish City To Ban Veils
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The Spanish city of Lleida has barred women from wearing face-covering Islamic veils inside its municipal building, making the northern city – population 135,000 – making it the first city in the country to legislate on the issue.
Lleida’s town hall passed the ban yesterday with 23 votes in favour, one against and two abstentions. The council said the veils were “degrading to women”.
The gesture is largely symbolic, because only about 3% of the population is Muslim and only a handful of Muslim women in Lleida actually wear body-covering burqas or face-covering niqab garments. However, as moves to ban burquas gather pace and support across many parts of Europe it’s an interesting new development.
Whether the burqa or the niqab are “degrading” to women is neither here nor there .. and if women feel so strongly about it, they can fight that as a separate issue ..
What’s at stake here are the far more important security issues .. If couriers & others wearing motor cycle helmets are required to remove them for security purposes, there can & should be no excuse for any faith, of whatever persuasion to have different rules ..
Muslims have been exploiting this situation for many years .. certainly when I was serving in Aden in the 1960’s there were cases of known & wanted male dissidents wearing female clothing to escape detection .. knowing full well that we wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to risk causing offence ..
I’m glad to see someone has the courage to make a stand ..
Agree completely. John Simpson travelled for a while wearing one, didn’t he, when he wanted to move incognito. No-one ever seems to have pulled him up on the ethics of doing that. And there was a robbery only a week or so ago with using a burqa as a disguise.
If someone ever needs to leave a country in a hurry then it’s the perfect cover (literally).
“Ethics” ? .. That’s a County to the East of London .. innit ? … 😉