Burqa Roundup

Given that a majority of French favor some form of restriction on wearing it, the measures proposed by the parliamentary commission to ban the burqa in public facilities seems likely to pass after the March elections.  This despite the fact that Sarkozy's UMP party is currently trailing (FR) in polls behind leftist parties, and is dead even with the Parti Socialiste.  If positing this debate was supposed to serve as a political red herring, it has not worked.  It has also earned the opprobrium of the Times, which sees the measure ostensibly as the other side of a coin shared with the Taliban.     
       
The most profound take I've read on the issue is an op-ed published by Abdennour Bidar, a philosopher (yes, in France one is still allowed to list "philosophe" as one's profession), in which he compares the decision to wear the veil as equivalent to a young adult's decision to look "goth," or  simply to dress trendy.  All of these are responses to what he sees as "a hypocritical discourse that hides a fearsome uniformity of consciousness and attitudes behind a superficial notion of 'tolerance.'"
 
There is a chance that the measures won't pass after all, if the Constitutional council decides to rule that the measures would violate civil liberties, as was recently suggested (FR) by one of France's premier constitutional scholars.