On a recent episode of his “Pray In Jesus Name” program, Religious Right activist Gordon Klingenschmitt applauded a law recently passed in Quebec that requires anyone providing or receiving any state service—including “boarding a bus, borrowing a book from the library or picking up a child at day care”—to do so with their face uncovered. Obviously, this has a dramatic impact on Muslim women who wear a burka or a niqab and you would think that someone like Klingenschmitt, who claims to care deeply about protecting religious liberty, would be outraged.
But you’d be wrong, since Klingenschmitt apparently only cares about protecting the religious liberty of conservative Christians, as he celebrated this new law for breaking “the spirit of slavery” that is at work in Islam, declaring that forcing Muslim women who chose to wear such garments to uncover their faces is intended to “liberate those women.”
“That liberates these women from the oppression of their false religion,” he said. “It’s actually the government protecting their right to uncover their face in public, in fact, insisting on freedom for women. This is not an anti-Muslim law, this is a pro-woman law and thank God. I discern the spirit of God on the people in Quebec who are liberating these women from the oppression of their abusive husbands.”
