A Burkini in Brooklyn
A diverse scene at a Red Hook pool speaks to what really makes this country great
Trying make the most of the last days of summer, I’ve been visiting the Red Hook community pool, which turns out to be the better public pools in New York City. This weekend, among a couple of hundred people there, three Muslim women splashed in the Olympic-sized pool with their daughters. All three wore “burkinis,” which covered them from head to toe with sleeves which reached down to their hands. They played with the two younger girls without comment or interruption from anyone around them.
I might not even have noted this blissful little scene, but it came in the wake of a week or two of stories from France where some cities made had made the burkini illegal. The French High Court reversed the rulings, saying they were an obvious infringement on freedom and that “there is no evidence that there were any risks that public order was disturbed by people’s choice of bathing garment.” An appropriate response to that might be, “No duh.”
Nonetheless, burkini-related stories permeated our news cycle, no doubt due to our own ongoing irrational discomfit with the presence of Muslims in our society, as well as some of the more unhinged fears of “creeping sharia” in certain quarters here. So this scene at the Red Hook pool turns…
