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Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any makeup.

I discovered that wearing the veil is not suitable for a woman who wants to work in activism and the public domain. People need to see you, to associate and relate to you. It is not stated in my religion to wear the veil; it is a traditional practice, so I took it off.

You would like me to say that the veil will be ripped from the voters' eyes sometime between now and November, thereby restoring the proper version of Democracy to the House and Senate. I won't say that, of course. The simple reason is, I don't know.

You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway.

Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.

And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.

A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.

I want to tell you this: you cannot get the robe of hypocrisy on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through every veil.

Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.