By a crushing 335-1 margin, the French legislature's lower house passed a ban on women wearing Islamic face coverings in public. The Washington post has more:
The legislation imposed a $185 fine or citizenship lessons — or both — on women caught outside their homes wearing the full-face coverings known as a burqa in Afghanistan and a niqab in North Africa. It set a fine of $38,000 and a one-year prison term for anyone convicted of forcing women and girls to wear such veils, reflecting a widely shared conviction here that Muslim women are forced to cover their faces by their fathers or husbands.
The law is expected to pass as easily in the upper house, where President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative coalition also dominates, as it did in the National Assembly. But before going into effect, legislators decided, the law will be submitted to the Constitutional Council, France's highest tribunal, to determine whether it is compatible with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.
