The mask unveiled

In April 2010, which makes it more than ten years ago, I blogged about the French government fining a 31-year old French woman for wearing a niqab while driving.

Yep, that was her crime.

That seemed like a different era. I call that BC--Before Coronavirus.  Now, France requires everybody to wear masks in the public.  So, if masks are mandatory, then a niqab should work, right?  Keep in mind that there is a huge difference between a niqab and a burqa:

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A niqab and a face mask reveal the eyes comparably, right?  Here's a photo of the French president with a mask on:

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You put a baseball cap, er, beret, on Macron and the niqab equivalent will be complete.

But then in the age of the coronavirus, France reveals what the niqab ban is really about:

That one type of face covering is seen as withdrawing from society and another has become a sign of civic duty reflects the contradictory ways France defines community and solidarity, political analysts and historians say.
“It’s not a hypocrisy, it’s a schizophrenia at the end,” said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of secularism and Islam. “Which is to say that it’s about the problem of Islam. If you cover your face for Islam, it’s not the republic. If you cover your face for a reason not to do with Islam, it’s acceptable.”

So, if a woman ventures out wearing a niqab but not a face mask, "the result is a Catch-22. Those who do not wear a mask can be fined, as can those who violate the face-covering law."

Amnesty International notes that "the current recommendations on wearing face masks also lay bare the absurdity of the arguments that some European governments have used to prohibit the wearing of face coverings in the public space."  

When has politics not been a theatre of the absurd!

One politician has made a fashion statement out of masks.

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That person making a fashion statement is the president of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová.

Caputova was here in Eugene not too long ago.  When I met with her and chatted, I never imagined her as the president of her country!  Life --the coronavirus included--is beyond my imagination.