"France denies citizenship to man with veiled wife"

French authorities have denied citizenship to a man who forced his French wife to wear a face-covering veil, saying he had rejected national values of secularism and gender equality.

The government has been speaking out strongly against head-to-toe veils, and is moving toward banning them in public after a long public debate over French national identity in the age of globalization.

Critics call the face-covering veil a gateway to extremism, but the move to ban it has drawn fierce criticism from some of France's five million Muslims, who say such restrictions are based in fear and intolerance of Islam.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has called the veils degrading to women and unwelcome in France. Sarkozy, a law-and-order conservative whose relations with the religious community have often been fraught, has been a vocal proponent of an all-out ban on the burqa, niqab and other face-covering religious veils.
Read more at: hosted2.ap.org/txdam/f02866e54f4149c297ea6f51ff09935f/Article_2010-02-04-EU-France-religious-Veil/id-pf6d5969cb8004abbaec6fc2111eeafff
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