The Oklahoma School Board and 11 year old Muslim girls.

IMO, acceptable outcomes to this are:

  1. Enforce the no head coverings rule equally
  2. Repeal the rule
  3. Allow head coverings for modesty, but don’t allow distracting or purely decorative hats

Personally, I’d opt for 2, replacing the current rule with a few guidelines to prevent trouble. For example, allow form-fitting head coverings in white, brown or black that don’t cover the face. It would even be reasonable for the school to loan a student an appropriate version, so as to prevent a disruption of education.

As far as I’m concerned, saying that only religious hats are allowed is elevating religion. People with no religious beliefs end up with fewer liberties than others. This invites the creation of spurious new religions, forcing the government to start deciding (establishing) which are legitimate and which aren’t.

Of course, sometimes I wonder whether we should protect religion at all. Unlike gender and race/nationality, religion is a matter of personal choice. Instead of trying to specifically accomodate every variation, the government should enact the least restrictive rules possible that accomplish necessary goals, giving equal weight to the opinions of all citizens (not favoring the religious hat-wearer over the modest hat-wearer). For example, instead of prohibiting employers from firing people who take off on high holy days, prohibit them from firing people for taking up to five personal days, provided they are scheduled 3 months in advance.

There are reasonable secular solutions to almost all of these kinds of issues. Instead of favoring one religion above the rest, they end up making life better for everybody, and still allowing us to easily outlaw the bad stuff (animal sacrifice, marrying minors, gender discrimination, etc.). All without sliding down the slippery slope to establishment.

Well, just to be fair to the Oklahoma School Board, this sort of thing isn’t limited to them.

I think if the rule is “no head gear/ hats, etc.” then she shouldn’t wear a hajib. I don’t care what her religion is. Her religion should be irrelevent. Isn’t that what the constitution says?

And as for the “gov’t promotes Christianity”, no I can’t remember where I heard it, but a teacher’s aide was told to hide her big-ass cross that she wore around her neck. When she refused I think she was fired. Can anyone remember this? It was recent.
So there you have a case of a very unobstrusive religious article and someone being punished for it. Now, the liberals will say that because she was a teacher’s aide, it represented an “endorsement” of religion.

Supposedly, David Limbaugh just wrote a book that has many stories of school kids having Bibles ripped out of their hands (it’s “hate speech” according to one teacher) and children being prevented from holding hands and praying before lunch. This was done in the name of “separation of church and state”. Somehow I doubt you’d have a problem with that. Anything anti-Christian is good. Anything anti-people who want to kill us is bad.

Rhum runner, I agree with you. The school should not be a position of determining what is a valid religious expression and what isn’t. It should make a rule and that’s it.

Suppose someone said that it was part of their religion to should at the top of their lungs for 60 seconds every half hour in praise of God? Does the school not have a right to maintain order?

Suppose Muslim students want to pray for during the day for 10 or 20 minutes at a time. Should they be excused from class to do that?

Why in the world would you want the schools or the gov’t involved with religion at all? Rules are rules, and if people can’t live with them, then they can be home schooled or whatever.

Suppose a Christian says that his religion forbids him from learning about evolution and demands to be exempted from that part of the curriculum. Somehow I think the liberals on here would blow a gasket if the school accomodated them…even if other students were not “distracted” in any way, shape or form.

For the millionth time, it’s HIJAB. H-I-J-A-B.

Anyway, as has been said before, Halloween is coming, and that straw man would look WAY more appropriate out on the lawn.

Find one person here who really thinks that. One. Particularly those last, profoundly idiotic three lines. I have HUGE problems with the majority of Christianity, but I certainly see it as deserving of as much protection for individual believers as any other religion. (I’ve got problems with them, too…) If those incidents that you mentioned really did happen in the way you say they did, that’s horrible. Possibly even more so than this. But even if those things are really happening to little Christian kids, that does NOT mean that this incident ought to be overlooked.

What would you think if a school district decided to require students to attend some activity on one Sunday morning a month as a condition of enrollment? Say little Billy Christiansen attends one of these schools. Although not all Christian churches stress attendance every Sunday, some do. Billy’s does. He’s decided that attending church every Sunday is essential to his practice of Christianity, in the way he views his religion. Should he be expelled if he decides to go to church instead of the school activity?

And by the way, on preview, at my high school the muslim kids prayed during their lunch hour.

Okay, maybe we can wrap this up. RHUM, I understand your position, though I don’t think it’s as strong as mine. :smiley: But you have correctly pointed out the inherent tension in simultaneously (a) telling the government it cannot advance religion, and (b) telling the government it must allow the individual free exercise of religion, even when that appears to include preferential treatment.

I would also point out that you continue to construe the girl as “asking” for something, when in fact she is IMO perfectly entitled to it, and at the end of the day it will be the government that will have to show that it is justified in infringing on her rights.

Again: NO, that isn’t what the constitution says. The constitution includes the right to freely practice religion within the ambit of rights the framers considered “fundamental,” to be explicit set out and afforded the highest protections. The constitution (appropriately, IME) attempts to keep the government out of religion, while reaffirming the role religion can play, and does play, in the lives of many Americans. So religion is not irrelevant under the constitution, because if you can reasonably argue that the government is interfering with the practice of your religion, you are entitled to significant constitutional protections. Those same constitutional protects are not afforded to people who might want to wear hats because they are balding, or like the Raiders, or think hats are cool.

And FYI: The issue of Sikh students carrying the kirpan (or religious dagger) has not been comprehensively addressed by a federal court, AFAIK. The most on-point case was Cheema, a Ninth Circuit case out of California, but it settled before the ultimate issue was taken up by the court. But AFAIK, many schools with Sikh students have solved the problem by insisting or some or all of the following: that the kirpan be dull; that it be sewn or welded into its sheath; that the student wear it inobtrusively (like under the clothing); and that the student submit to on-demand inspection of the kirpan by the school authorities.

But AFAIK most schools have not insisted that a comprehesive “no knives” policy means that Sikh students should be thrown out of school – precisely because of the legal nightmare that would cause. Instead, they have solved the problem through compromise and the judicious application of some common sense, exactly what’s called for here, IMO.

Anyway . . . . So this is the Loony Left, huh? I thought the club house would be nicer. :smiley:

A school has the right to maintain order. How the distraction of someone screaming every half hour can be compared to a girl wearing a piece of cloth on her head is beyond me.

I think I had mentioned that in my post, if you had bothered to actually read what I had written, that is.

Fair enough. An interesting situation with, I think, valid arguments to be made on both sides. Cheers.

Am I the only person that went to a school that covered this in the dress code?

My high school specifically allowed religious head coverings and medically prescribed head coverings/sunglasses while disallowing other hats/head scarves/etc.

She should be allowed to wear anything that pertains to her practice of religion. That’s obvious.

My opinion was honest, but certainly open for debate. I’m not wedded to it.

I wouldn’t say I knew any more about the Muslim faith than anyone else as it is something that the locals and I don’t discuss much. Being an athiest, I tend to be very discrete about it here. They probably think I am a Christian and I’m not about to disuade them from that opinion. That doesn’t stop us from talking about politics or everything else.

That being said, what I do know is that the daily prayers are more important than what a person wears. I’m basing this upon what I have been told and from what I’ve observed. It is interesting that flying between Yemen and the UAE that the women on the Yemeni side tend to be more conservatively dressed getting on the plane. Many step off the plane in Dubai having shed parts of their Burkah. It has lead me to think that these articles of clothing are treated more as a tradition than a requirment of their religion. Walk through a mall in Dubai and traditional dress is in the distinct minority, including Hijabs.

Prayer, on the other hand is a requirement and is five times a day, but can be skipped if necessary for work purposes, or other reasons. From what I understand they make up for it in later sessions. Does this girl pray at the required times? The link doesn’t say, but I’d be surprised if she did as that would be far more noticable than a hijab. I’d also think it would be far more indicative of her faith, too.

It seems to me that the hijab is a traditional garb that isn’t necessarily a requirement of her religion as many people disregard it and still consider themselves Muslims. Prayer is a more important part of the religion and if she is ignoring that then not wearing the hijab isn’t going to make up for it. Which puts this particular case, IMHO, into a more of a “See, look at me!” thing than any thing else. If that is the case, then by allowing it falls more into the realm of what Rhum has been arguing.

This has taken way to long to write and I’m still not happy with it, but I’m posting it anyway. So, cut me some slack when tearing it apart, okay?

I bothered to read your post, Uzi. You recall that one, don’t you, the one I addressed, the one where you essentially dismissed this girl’s stance.

For what it’s worth, the school where I work has a similar no headgear inside policy, in addition to no baseball caps of any kind anywhere on campus and a ban on all “gang chic” clothing styles. We have a few students from a family whose culture or religion requires that the boys (and possibly the girls, we have none in our school) wear their hair in a knot on top of the the head with a cloth cap type of covering on it. We also have a little girl who wears a hair rag to cover the baldness she has from chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Both of these are considered common sense exceptions to the general rule.

No, you obviously didn’t as you missed the line where I said, “Unless this girl is a member of some sect that enforces such head dress rules upon its members…”. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough when I said that. If you don’t like what I said then fine, tell me what I’ve done wrong. But, please, don’t use an argument to say I’m spreading bullshit without at least taking the time to confirm that the argument is valid.

Nor do I think I was dismissing her stance, I was disagreeing with other arguments stating that she is required to wear that head dress to be part of her religion. How is that dismissing her stance? Are we to take whatever a person says is their belief as the truth and then make allowances for that? If that is the case then the jewish kid who wants to wear a baseball cap instead of a yarmulke has a good case for it. Of course there is a difference between single cases and accepted practices in a religion, but if members of her sect can still be in her sect and not wear a head dress walking down the street, then it isn’t against her religion to ask her to not wear a scarf to school.

Unfortunately, it seems that the Muskogee school officials who refused to let this little girl wear her hijab don’t even have a passing acquaintance with common sense. The article linked to in the OP was much shorter than the article that appeared in the Tulsa World and neglected to include this delicious morsel of tolerance and open-mindedness:

It’s amazing how he tries at first to make this incident appear to be nothing more than an attempt to maintain peace and order in his schools, then immediately makes it crystal clear that it was a case of religious persecution all along. It should also be noted that the girl was also forbidden from praying in school, another piece of information left out of the CNN article*. Now, I know a lot of you are saying, “But school prayer, regardless of the specific religion in question, was determined by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional back in the early Sixties.” That’s not exactly true. It’s only school or instructor led prayer that’s forbidden. Granted, there have been incidents of educators forbidding students from praying in school, reading the bible in school, turning in religion-themed essays and artwork for class assignments, etc., but these educators were in the wrong, ethically and legally. Somehow I doubt that any student in the Muskogee school system would be forbidden from praying to Jesus in school.

Finally, I’d like to express my utter amazement that someone could claim, with a straight face, that Muskogee, Oklahoma, is a hotbed of occult activity.

*I wish I could provide a link to the Tulsa World article, but unfortunately, you have to pay to read their archived articles. If you don’t mind paying, you can find it on their website by doing a search for “Muskogee” and “hijab”.

This stupid.
Really fucking stupid.

It’s a head scarf. For modesty.
Exactly who is it harming?

She believes, as part of her culture and religion, that she should cover her hair.

Why can’t she?

Most people don’t like that fact that non muslim women in some middle eastern countries are made to wear headscarves. Even though they don’t subscribe to the culture or religion which dictates that they be worn.

Most people would say that the women should be able to cover up or not as they see fit.

Why should that be different in the US?

I know muslim girls and women who wear hijab, I know some who don’t. I know jewish men who choose to wear yarmulke I know some who don’t, and I know sikhs who don’t wear turbans, as well as some who do.

Where’s the harm?

Does an 11 year old Muslim girl even need to wear a head covering? I thought that the age where they have to start being ‘modest’ was later, but maybe I’m wrong.

This liberal needs to call bullshit on this story. Perhaps it’s true, in which case the teacher’s aide is a fool with no idea of her rights. If she was repremanded and fired, she could have gone to the ACLU to help her get her job back and have a judge talk some sense to this school.

My teacher husband wears his big-ass Guido cross into his public school classroom every day. But someone at his district actually knows how to interpret the Constitution.

People being as ignorant as they are, and teachers being people, I have no doubt that misinformed teachers occasionally do this. Misinformed teachers. Not Christian-killing teachers. However, school officials who do this are legally in the wrong. And if people would know their rights and fight the ignorance instead of stewing in their martyrdom, this could be changed.

Of course, perhaps your point would be more coherant if you did not reference books of which you have no personal knowledge.

Common sense. Applications of which could solve so many of the world’s problems.

Generally, the head covering is adopted at puberty, so the age of 11, which is when girls sometimes get interested in the opposite sex, is okay. There’s no standard age; instead, it’s adopted when either the girl decides or her parents think she’s ready. In an article about a Muslim doll planned as an alternative to Barbie, an 11-year-old American girl is said to have “recently donned the veil after much soul-searching.”

I was going to stick my head in here and say that 11 is not too young to be into puberty, and to the best of my knowledge that’s about when most girls start wearing them.

I still think this is just religious bigotry. We all known that eleven-year-old American Muslim girls must be terrorists, or something. :rolleyes: They can try to justify it all they want, but they’re going to have a damn hard time convincing me that it’s anything else.