The Assemblée Nationale passes the burqa ban.

From CNN:

The vote was 335 to 1, with 339 lawmakers not voting. [Why would you not vote?]

… French people back the ban by a margin of more than four to one, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found in a survey this spring.

Some 82 percent of people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved. That was the widest support the Washington-based think tank found in any of the five countries it surveyed.

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

… The bill envisions a fine of 150 euros ($190) and/or a citizenship course as punishment for wearing a face-covering veil.

Forcing a woman to wear a niqab or a burqa would be punishable by a year in prison or a 15,000-euro ($19,000) fine, the government said, calling it “a new form of enslavement that the republic cannot accept on its soil.”

The measure would take effect six months after passage, giving authorities time to try to persuade women who veil themselves voluntarily to stop…

Amnesty International cautions that some women completely annihilate their public existence “as an expression of their identity.”

A conundrum worthy of Jacques Derrida.

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Update: One advantage of all the attention the burqa has been getting lately: Thoughtful feminists are revisiting the issue. Here’s an example, from a blog written by a group of British feminists. One of the bloggers who has until now opposed burqa bans notes that

Mona Eltahawy’s comments have really given me pause for thought as a feminist.

She’s particularly responsive to these comments from Eltahawy:

I often tell (feminists) that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.