Cultural freedom may be our core dogma, but does it include freedom to be unfree? Bring it home. Say your daughter converts to Islam, as Western women are apparently doing by the bucketload. She comes to dinner in a burqa, tells you it is God's will, tells you it is forever. How do you respond?

The burqa is seen, here in the latte classes, as a symbol of the fight for cultural tolerance. But is this reasonable?

Fred Nile's near-total isolation in Parliament during the second reading of his anti-burqa bill in June was no doubt due in part to the flavour of his support, namely Roy Smith, of the Shooters' Party (a natural alliance, this, between Christians and lion killers).

But it's the same in my neck of the woods, where the right-to-burqa is a flag waved not only by the left but by anyone who wishes to be - or seem to be - untainted by racism.

We further accept the burqa, as a total-immersion device, as the defining icon of feminine modesty, a raised finger to supposedly blatant Western sexualism. This implicit criticism, and the West's meek acceptance of it, heightens the garment's tolerance-value (in a manner remarkably like turn-the-other-cheek Christianity). But I digress.