Across at the sad red earth, Jay writes to express some reservations about my post on the woman excluded from a French class in Quebec because she refused to uncover her face. Jay makes a number of points, but I shall focus on one of them in particular. He writes:
Whatever religious, philosophical, or psychic justification the wearer of the niqab may offer for the dress, another individual, even a teacher, is within her own human integrity to find the obscured human face, the withholding of what others openly present - an affront. Legal restriction, it may be, should not be founded on an affront, but neither should an individual be compelled to accept it.
The apparent symmetry of the 'not... neither' statement here might suggest that a reasonable balance is being struck: on the one hand, no legal compulsion merely to protect people from affront; on the other hand, no compulsion to accept the affront either. In a liberal society, however, there is nothing at all reasonable about this balance. If individuals have extensive rights and freedoms, as they ought to have - up to the limit where their actions harm others - then, in one critical sense, all of us are indeed obliged to accept things which affront us, provided these do not also harm anyone, violate their rights or liberties. Of course, we don't have to like what affronts us, and if we dislike something enough we don't have to tolerate it in spaces over which we have exclusive rights. You don't want someone wearing the niqab in your house or your car? You don't want a crucifix or a yarmulke or a shirt bearing the logo of French Connection UK worn there? Then you aren't obliged to accept any of them. But in spaces over which you don't have rights of control you can't forbid them. And there's a second sense in which you needn't accept what affronts you. You don't have to pretend to be happy about it. You're free to tell the bearer of the affront what you think of it, and of her for putting the affront your way. But, once again, you do have to accept that she may go on putting it your way in shared spaces, and in that sense you are compelled to accept it - or should be in a liberal society.
The context of Jay's argument concerns what teachers accept from their students. Naturally, teachers are free, even in a liberal society, to restrict usages and behaviours that obstruct or disrupt the educational process. But a teacher's being merely affronted, if he can show no more legitimate complaint than this, is not to the point. Neither is the argument for keeping a certain space secular. For the space to be secular, no more is required than to keep its facilities - the walls, the rooms, the buildings - free of religious symbols. The symbols a student wears on her own person are not the school's business. In a liberal society. Of course, there can be societies that are liberal by and large, but disfigured by illiberal and discriminatory practices.