France Goes to War Against Modest Beachwear

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier.

One of the phrases I overhear a lot in people’s conversations that is always guaranteed to rankle is “…there ought to be a law…,” when about 99.9999999 times out of 100 no, there probably shouldn’t be any such law as the person is suggesting.

Laws, by their nature, suck. They are almost always intended to set some sort of irrational limit on human behavior and they almost always require the money of the people they’re oppressing to pay for the government agents who will be enforcing the law against them. Violently if need be. And, that’s another big problem with laws; enforcing them. Many on the Left believe laws are like magic spells, and once they’re written down upon the sacred scrolls of the State, their power takes hold all by itself; that’s how a law banning private sales of firearms would, in their mind, prevent all private sales of firearms. Magic!

Of course, there is no magic, so, someone has to go out enforcing the laws. All the laws. Even, the really dumb ones; as the citizens of Nice, and other beachfront French cities are discovering.

The New York Times ran a story

and photo yesterday, the latter showing a bunch of armed French police officers standing around a woman as she removed portions of the “burkini” she was wearing; a burkini being a full-body-covering swimsuit designed to conform with Islam’s silly-ass modesty laws. They, for whatever reason, no longer conform with French beach attire laws, because nations need beach attire laws, and, well, as with all laws, someone has to enforce them.

 

“On Wednesday, photographs flashed across the globe on social media of French police officers forcing modestly clad Muslim women on beaches to pay fines, leave or disrobe. A storm of criticism erupted, followed by some political backpedaling a week after the nation’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, had denounced the little-worn burkini as a tool of ‘enslavement.’

“At least 20 municipalities on the Mediterranean, as well as several in northern France, have enacted bans against the garment on the grounds that it is not ‘appropriate,’ ‘respectful of good morals and of secularism’ and ‘respectful of the rules of hygiene and security of bathers on public beaches,’” wrote Alissa J. Rubin in her story for the NYT yesterday.

Of course, laws don’t just represent an inherent threat to liberty and are typically a pain to enforce, they also carry meta-messages that mouth-breathers tend to pick up on and run with. A “law of the land” after all, is theoretically a law that represents all the people of the nation and their collective will; this tends to embolden those who happen to agree with the law to begin with, because they never liked the people the law is targeted at.

“The officers surrounded the woman, who was wearing a tunic, leggings and a head scarf, fined her and ordered her to leave the beach… A crowd gathered. ‘I heard things I had never heard to my face,’ said the woman, who gave her name only as Siam to the French magazine L’Obs. ‘Like, ‘Go back to where you came from’ ‘Madame, the law is the law, we are fed up with this fuss,’ and ‘We are Catholic here,’”” Rubin wrote.

Just as in the United States, some people do get off on seeing their government’s surrogates of violence hassle people they don’t happen to like; and such people are typically wholly ignorant of the fact that they could just as easily be on the receiving end of such hassling. In theory, anyway. Humans, being a tribal lot, tend to look more kindly on those who look like them, and less so on those from “outside.” This tribal instinct doubtlessly served our ancestors well, but today it tends to get translated into an uneven application of oppressive laws.

According to the article, one of the women with “Siam” asked the officers if they were going to look for and cite people wearing crosses as the “burkini” law targets all outward expressions of religiosity. Well, it’s supposed to, anyway.

“’We are not going to hunt for crosses. Get going, madame. You are being told to leave the beach,’” Rubin’s story quoted one of the officers as replying to the woman’s question.

Of course, low-information, nationalistic voters are a low-hanging fruit for “conservative” politicians, the world over, French ones too, even.

“However, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is vying to be the center-right candidate in the 2017 French presidential elections, told Le Figaro Magazine that ‘doing nothing’ against the burkini would be ‘another retreat’ for France,” Rubin wrote in her piece.

Yes, the Battle of the Burkini won’t be another Dunkirk, or Paris. The mighty French won’t retreat from a full-body-covering bit of lycra the way they did the Nazis. Not this time.

Not all frogs are aboard this particularly lily pad, however. Some French citizens have rightfully called the laws discriminatory. Others from around the world have chimed in as well. Many Twitter users posted pictures of nuns wading into the water still wearing their habits and wondered if French police would make them similarly disrobe. Theoretically, they’d be required to. In practice, well, I guess we’ll see.

The French Burkini ban offers us, if nothing else, a wonderful and concise example of what happens when governments pass dumb laws. It should serve to remind us that government itself is a powerful, dangerous and generally evil thing and should only ever be invoked as a very last resort; and then, only to handle real problems, like actual, impending existential threats. And even then, there are probably better options. Anyway, it should go without saying that nothing anyone could ever wear, or not wear, on a beach rises to the level of importance where a law needs to be written about it; a law that will then have to be enforced by armed surrogates of state violence.