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Why doesn't "what if the roles were reversed" ever work? I mean it works for me. I actually am convinced when people bring up that argument. But it never works when conservatives say it to progressives.
Why I'm bringing this up is that recently Abdul El-Sayed's wife appeared on stage wearing something not dissimilar to an outfit from "Handmaid's Tale".
https://x.com/FedPoasting/status/2118389760070725932
What if the roles were reversed? What if Mike Pence or Mitt Romney or J.D. Vance of Pete Hegseth showed up like this?
I have a hard time explaining why this line of reasoning just does not land at all with progressives. To me it seems like a slam dunk. What am I missing? And is there a conservative equivalent to this, i.e. a meta role reversal where conservatives are the one being hypocrites?
I'm sure Romney's wife was also wearing magic underwear, and I don't recall that ever being a serious debate during his campaign. I could maybe see some devout Christian woman who is also a public figure (ACB? She doesn't seem that trad) adopting the traditional-in-some-communities practice of veiling, but I doubt that it'd make much of a splash. For better or worse, I don't know that the leftists are wrong that concern about headscarves is from seeing Muslims (especially observant ones) as an outgroup. IMO face covering is a bit different, but I'd bet there are hair covering styles that wouldn't seem too out of place in everyday life from the Christian traditions: hats are pretty normalized.
Anne Romney probably did veil in the context the mormon tradition requires. ACB may or may not; you'd have to send someone to watch her at church. No one cares because they wear normal western clothing. The plain folk veil with bonnets, the actual trad western headcovering(mantillas which are now popular among younger Catholics would have been completely unknown in the Anglosphere when veiling was actually required).
I don't know if Ireland counts as "the Anglosphere" but when I was a young warthog, women wore hats in church or veils (often it was girls who wore the white mantillas). In fact, when I heard the term "chapel veil", I went "what that?" and then "oh, it's a mantilla!"
When the Children of Mary sodality was still going in my parish, the lay women wore blue cloaks and white mantillas. Something like this, in fact.
In the immediate aftermath of Vatican II when the New Mass came in and the rules were relaxed, my mother got rid of her (four) hats for Mass and gladly never wore a hat again. She never wore hats except for going to Mass.
I'm not old enough to remember the church before VII. But my grandmother referred to mantillas as 'doilies' because she just literally didn't know the term; when she was a teen and young adult she had to wear a hat or a scarf, of course, but she called them those things, and not a 'veil'.
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