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When I lived in Maryland, I used to go to the beach with family and friends. We'd see there the Muslim men wearing the most absurd Speedos, and their women bundled up in all-black head-to toe stuff, looking for all the world like ninjas at the North Pole.
None of my business, but it used to provoke the hell out of me. It is nothing but oppression, it has the stink of a display to the rest of the world of how very pious everybody is, and I found the whole thing to be very in-your-face.
I'm sorry, but I'm about to betray a prejudice here: if any of my friends converted to Islam, and insisted that THIS sort of behavior was required, I could not be friends with them anymore.
A story:
When I was at NCO Academy, one of the guys in my class (appointed as class leader, by the way) was an American Muslim. He was VERY observant: we had to start class late every day after lunch, because that call-to-prayer time was not 'movable', like some others, and he'd go out back with his prayer rug, come back in and we'd get going.
Never thought much about it. Graduation day came, and I was meeting the families of all my classmates for the first time. When I was introduced to Mrs. Sadiq, I put out my hand, smiled and said, 'Pleased to meet you.'
TSgt Sadiq said, 'She's forbidden to shake your hand. But she's pleased to meet you.' She never said a word, and didn't look up. I was VERY uneasy about the whole thing, and I felt different about Sadiq from that moment on. I felt like asking both of them, 'Are either of you aware that that's not what we do here? That it's customary to take the hand that's offered in friendship, and to NOT take it is considered rude, even hostile? Do you know [to him] that I think you're an oppressive beast, and that you [to her]consider yourself his property?
But that's all a private matter, even though it leads to an alienation of Muslim from All Others, and from male and female, which is bad enough. The subject of the article, however, is the use of public facilities to segregate a preferred group from another. And not just ANY group, but one that holds itself superior to the Main Body of Culture, the NATIVE customs, if you will. Well, that offends me, and I'm damned if I would EVER let myself be denied my rights so that another's may be exalted.
It's worth fighting about, and folks...that day gets closer all the time.
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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
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