A simple question deserves a simple answer. Does an accused have the legal right to face his or her accuser in a court of law in Ontario? The answer is unequivocally yes.

The answer isn’t subject to approval based on whether the accuser believes there’s a man in the clouds who appointed a 7th Century shepherd to be his spokesperson. The answer is absolute, final, and definitive. When a person accuses you of a crime, you have the unfettered legal right to face that person.

So why is it that Ontario is now wasting untold bushels of cash having an appeal court adjudicate whether a lower court was in its legal rights to demand that a Muslim woman remove her niqab before testifying in court? Why has more than one second been spent analyzing this case?

A judge asked a Muslim woman to show her face because, as terrifyingly logical as it may sound, those are the rules, which were written for everyone. Not for everyone, except Muslims.

“Why are we getting all bent out of shape about this?” asked Mr. Justice David Doherty. “This isn’t about somebody coming into court saying: ‘I need to wear a bag over my head because of my religious beliefs.’

“I remember that when I was a lawyer, I had nuns testify and nobody said we should go and make them change,” Judge Doherty said. “And kids wear really baggy clothes now, don’t they?”

Simple question and answer time. Did the nuns and the kids with baggy clothes have their faces obscured so that their identity was in contention? No? Then please stay on topic, your honour.

At an inquiry last year, Provincial Court Judge Norris Weisman ordered a 32-year-old woman — who cannot be identified, making this doubly ridiculous — to remove her niqab so that defence counsel could assess her claims. The judge then expressed skepticism about the reason for her wearing of the niqab, and I don’t blame him. Who wouldn’t want to hide behind a face mask while testifying about a molestation case? Thousands of people before her have had to go before the courts, raise their head up high, and recall horrible abuses in front of the person or persons they are accusing.

So it’s entirely reasonable to suspect that her real motivations for hiding behind the niqab were based on the subject matter, rather than her devotion to Allah.

But in the end, all of this really has nothing to do with the fact that the laws were written for everybody. And they apply to everybody equally and blindly. If we bend the laws for certain kinds of people, it means that the law is not absolute. It is malleable and relativist and discriminatory. It says that all men are equal before the law, but some are more equal than others.