"It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.”

One use of freedom is to choose -- for yourself alone -- not to be free. Is it not an abuse of freedom to reject the freedom to choose submission?

David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been “too deferential.”

“It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent,” Mr. Sexton wrote. “It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.”

So women are supposed to dress in a way that doesn't express the wrong thing about men? What if some other woman wanted to walk around in a T-shirt with the words "All men are rapists" on it? Sexton has homed in on the least valid reason to outlaw the niqab: that it expresses an opinion that offends you.