They’ll Slap Your Hand for Opening a Door.

Leave a CommentThey’ll Slap Your Hand for Opening a Door.Commentary

But They’ll Cover Their Hair for the Muslim Room.

Kathy Hochul put on a black hijab Friday at an Islamic cultural center school in the Bronx and addressed a hall of men. The clip hit the internet Sunday. She has called herself a feminist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the same costume in May at an Eid gathering in the same borough, at a mosque, before prayer, standing with the new mayor. She called it manners. The country is supposed to clap.

This is not complicated. It is a caste system with a press secretary.

The Rule That Only Runs One Way

Western feminism spent a generation treating a held door as an insult and a compliment on a dress as workplace violence. The same politicians will lecture you about bodily autonomy until the room changes. Then the hair goes under a scarf because someone else’s tradition requires women to disappear a little so the men can be comfortable.

Covering your head in a sanctuary is an old courtesy. Jews do it. Some churches did it. Taking your shoes off is not a surrender of the Fourteenth Amendment. The unhinged part is the selective spine. These are the people who will not enter a bakery that iced the wrong cake. They will not say “mother.” They will fight a dress code at a public school. They will not fight a dress code that marks female submission in a political photo-op.

Iranian women have been beaten, jailed, and worse for refusing the same garment. That fight had a slogan and a year. American officeholders borrowed the scarf and left the slogan at home. Solidarity that never risks the morality police is not solidarity. It is hospitality toward the side that still has the police.

What the Camera Was For

Hochul was not sneaking into a funeral pew. She was on a stage, thanking dignitaries, playing governor in a wrap. AOC was not a tourist who forgot a chapel veil. She was a national brand, Catholic by biography, socialist by brand, wrapping for a holiday crowd that was overwhelmingly male. When critics noticed the room, the defense was “respect.” Respect is what you call it when the cost is a piece of cloth and the payoff is a voting bloc.

New York is twelve days from the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day this city learned what political Islam can do with airplanes. Nobody is saying every man in that hall hijacked a jet. Everybody is allowed to notice that the political class of the targeted city now performs the opposite of memory: it performs deference.

If a conservative governor covered for a photo in a way that flattered a church the left hates, we would get a week of “theocracy.” When the left covers for a tradition that polices women’s hair, we get a seminar on pluralism.

How Unhinged Is It?

It is unhinged in the precise way late-empire manners are unhinged. The loudest feminists reserved their fury for the mildest American men and saved their courtesy for cultures that write female obedience into the dress code. They will not be ruled by a husband holding a door. They will be styled by a room that prefers them silent from the neck up.

You can visit a mosque without auditioning for the part. You can take your shoes off and keep your argument. What they did was put the argument in a drawer for an hour and call the drawer respect. That is not interfaith harmony. That is a ruling class that has decided which patriarchy is the fun kind—the one that votes for them.