If there were only one person who didn’t want a national debate about the wearing of the face veil, that person would be me. It’s not that I think the issue is either uninteresting or unimportant; it’s that I’ve already written about it and related issues more than 50 times. If you want to sample what I’ve had to say on the subject, go to this post and then take your pick from the 54 links I give four paragraphs down.
Still, and in a nutshell, the overriding consideration is that wearing what one wants is a matter of affirming one’s identity, whether religious or other, is an aspect of freedom of speech and opinion, and is therefore of major importance. Other things equal, it should suffer no restriction from the law. By the same token, no one should be coerced or intimidated into wearing what they don’t want to, and where this happens it should be subject to legal restraint and penalty. But women who freely choose to wear a face covering should have the right to do so, and if you find that objectionable, as a symbol of women’s subordination, you have to proceed by argument, persuasion and education in the hope that these will secure the dissemination of more egalitarian cultural norms.
Freedom to affirm one’s identity, however, is not the only value of critical importance, and Judge Peter Murphy’s ruling is right in holding that judicial processes depend crucially on people’s being in a position to see those giving evidence, so as to be able to evaluate their evidence properly. Personally, I’m not convinced by all arguments of the sort, ‘Successful interaction within our culture relies on encounters being open and face-to-face’. It isn’t always so: think of how much we can and do do by phone and email. But assessing the quality of someone’s testimony is mostly facilitated by being able to see their face. The fair and efficient administration of justice is important enough to require some compromise of the freedom to wear what one likes. There are other such exception-requiring situations: those, for example, where one needs to be able to verify a person’s identity. Nothing, however, can justify a blanket principle that no one should ever be able to hide their face from others.