Here’s another of those relativizing – or, in this case, perhaps just confused – columns about liberal freedom. The writer is Cynthia Banham and she starts out on the subject of clothes. Our clothes can be like armour; between us and them there’s a complex relationship. Where it gets to is the debate about the wearing of the burqa, and in this connection Banham comes over all different-meanings-of-freedom. She concludes:
The view held by some liberals that humans can grow and thrive only in societies that follow their own political beliefs – including the belief that a woman must dress in a certain way in order to be “free” – is a paradoxical one, to say the least.
It depends on which beliefs you mean. It is indeed paradoxical, as a liberal, to think that other people should have to dress as you prefer or dictate; but it is not at all paradoxical to think – as a liberal – that people are most likely to be able to ‘grow and thrive’ best in societies in which they are guaranteed a wide space of personal freedom. I’d say that the liberal was a strange one who thought that growing and thriving could take place equally well anywhere – under tyranny just as well as not, oppressed within the home as well as not, with not enough to eat, etc.