WE'VE TRADED OUTRAGE FOR POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!
The Outrage of Allowing American Muslim Women to Hide Their Face For a Driver's License Photo
M. Toomey, PhD
In 2002, Florida allowed a Muslim woman to have her driver's license picture taken with her face hidden. In the name of civil rights, religious custom was allowed to supersede a woman's human right to exist as an individual with an identity of her own. With her face hidden, a woman is declared the property of a man. Sexism of this magnitude should never be tolerated, yet without any public outcry, it is not only tolerated it is given legal sanction, in the name of freedom of religion.
Why do we use a picture as identification on a driver's license in the first place? For the same reason I am decrying the permission to have a woman's face covered for the picture. To make it possible to identify us from our picture. Our face is the primary basis for this photo recognition. Not our hands. Not our feet. Not our height or weight. Our face with our eyes, our nose, our mouth, our chin, our hair, and our complexion, form the external image of who we are. Something about our age, our race, our individuality and our way of relating to the world is hinted at in our face. We are identifiable by our unique face. To cover it is to lose our identity. When our face is hidden we become a generic object, someone who is supposed to be a woman, but with no distinguishing physical face to show who we are, we are not even a woman, we are only a covering that is expected to be hiding a woman.
A picture on our driver's license is for only one purpose, identification. What does it say that we can't be identified because our face is hidden, and it is hidden because we are a woman. How far is that from not being able to be treated by a Doctor because we can't be seen by any man but our husband? We are told that Afghan women died because they couldn't be treated by male Doctors and women were no longer allowed to practice medicine. It is the symbol of being owned as property, as a slave, by another.
Only women are allowed to be hidden, and treated as property, without any public outcry. What greater example of destructive sexism do we have to encounter before there is outrage at the erasure of a woman's humanity and her human rights by hiding her from view. Becoming a generic figure hidden under full face and body garb is barbaric and dehumanizing. Why is it being legally sanctioned in these United States of America without so much as a whimper? Where is Amnesty International? We and they worry about the rights of the terrorists being held in prison in Cuba? That is more noticeable and outrageous to us than denouncing a violation of a woman's basic human right to physically exist, as a unique woman with a face reflecting our stature and dignity. My God, what have we become?
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