From The Philosopher’s Beard, the opening of a post that offers non-bigoted justifications for a ban on burqas in open societies, though I don’t think the arguments would be deemed acceptable if applied to other orthodox belief systems:
“Bans on wearing the burqa and other face-covering religious garb (such as are under consideration or recently passed in several European countries) fall under a class of restrictions by government on the free choice of individuals over private matters. They thus have the appearance of being illiberal, of disrespecting people’s natural rights to manage their own affairs in general, and to follow their own plan of life in particular. In fact, it is possible to justify such a ban in liberal terms. But not just any kind of ban will do.
Political debate about the burqa in the west is dominated by an unfortunate bigotry, a species of moral foolishness antithetical to liberalism. I have heard and read serious arguments for banning the burqa because it causes vitamin D deficiency (lack of sunshine), because people will try to rob banks dressed in burqas, because this is alien to our face-to-face culture, and so on. Such arguments are, respectively, trivial, stupid, and xenophobic (if not racist).
Yet it seems to me that there are in fact plausible liberal arguments for banning the burqa (and various other things, such as addictive drugs), which focus on the harms that the burqa may do to the personal autonomy of particularly vulnerable women and girls.”