The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson explains, in terms I 95% agree with, why Europe’s burqa bans are a bad idea:

Belgium is moving toward a total ban on face-covering veils in public. Italian police recently fined a woman for wearing a burqa. In France, a law banning garments “designed to hide the face” is likely to be introduced in July. “The burqa is not a sign of religion,” says French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”

…

The motives of European leaders in this controversy are [un]sympathetic. Some speak deceptively (and absurdly) of a security motive for banning Islamic covering. Who knows what they are hiding? But by this standard, the war on terrorism would mandate the wearing of bikinis. The real purpose of burqa bans is to assert European cultural identity — secular, liberal and individualistic — at the expense of a visible, traditional religious minority. A nation such as France, proudly relativistic on most issues, is convinced of its cultural superiority when it comes to sexual freedom. A country of topless beaches considers a ban on excessive modesty. The capital of the fashion world, where women are often overexposed and objectified, lectures others on the dignity of women.

For what the opinion of an outsider is worth, I do think the burqa is oppressive. It seems designed to restrict movement, leaving women clumsy, helpless, dependent and anonymous. The vast majority of Muslim women do not wear complete covering because the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment.

But at issue in Europe is not social disapproval; it is criminalization. In matters of religious liberty, there are no easy or rigid rules … Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case. But if a democratic majority can impose its will on a religious minority for any reason, religious freedom has no meaning. The state must have strong, public justifications to compel conformity, especially on an issue such as the clothes that citizens wear.

In France — where only a few thousand women out of 5 million Muslims wear the burqa — a ban is merely a symbolic expression of disdain for an unpopular minority. It would achieve little but resentment.

Keys here for me:

• The idea that we’re respecting the dignity of women by banning burqas is contemptible nonsense given how we treat women ourselves. Immodesty is not authentically liberating.
• As intimated in Gerson’s opening (not quoted above), the ban is a kind of Western imperialism, only exercised over immigrants not “through colonialism but through migration.” As Gerson says, “Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case,” but burqa bans are not protecting fundamental rights.
• I have long wanted to maintain a capacious middle ground between (1) crime and (2) legal right. I want to be able to disapprove and even, perhaps, to shun practitioners of bad behaviors (call them “(1.5) Vice”) that I wouldn’t want criminalized. As an Orthodox Christian, I would exercise that sparingly, but there are instances like excommunication where it is expected that arms-length will be maintained even as one prays for the repentance of the excommunicated one. And, yes, I willingly cede the same to others who disapprove of something I do; I’ve been wrong, and sometimes it was expressions of disapproval — not legal sanctions — that set me right again.

However, Gerson emphasizes the wrongness of burqas even on Islamic principle (“the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment”). It strikes me as presumptuous for an outsider to hold much opinion about the teaching of another tradition’s holy books. Living religious traditions may well have interpretive traditions of some subtlety, or may have extratextual traditions that are considered legitimately binding. In that sense, Gerson himself applies his Protestant “Bible only” sensibility to Islam in an “imperialist” spirit that may differ from European secularists impositions of sexual freedom more in degree than in kind.