Freedom, Unfreedom, and the Burkini

TD weighs in at Taki’s Magazine on the burkini debate in France. He argues that it is usually difficult to tell when such religious restrictions are freely adopted or coerced, but in this case he thinks it’s the former:

…in the case of the burkini someone has made the rule that women on a beach must be dressed “modestly,” and that such modest dress is a precondition of permission to go on the beach. Permission from whom? The rule might be a mere diktat of men, but it might also be, and in my view probably is, a rule accepted by many of the women irrespective of its origin. In other words, to forbid such women from wearing the burkini would be an unjustified abrogation of their freedom, which is exactly the conclusion that the French courts reached.

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