Religious Freedom Victory: Legal Advocates Defend Muslim Student's Right to Wear Head Covering
by Jim Brown
May 25, 2004
(AgapePress) - According to a settlement agreement, an Oklahoma school district is paying an undisclosed sum and changing its dress code to allow a sixth-grade girl to wear her Muslim head scarf.The Rutherford Institute filed a religious discrimination suit on behalf of an 11-year-old who had been suspended twice for wearing her hijab, a head covering worn by many Muslim women in observance of the tenets and traditions of Islam. School officials said the hijab violated the school dress code, which included a ban on hats and other head coverings. Also, the school apparently said other students were frightened by the scarf.
However the school dress code policy has now been changed to accommodate the student's religious beliefs. Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead says the settlement sends an important message, communicating to officials and others that public schools cannot be allowed to become "bastions of secularism."
The settlement also stipulates that the Muskogee, Oklahoma, school system must educate its teachers about the new dress code and students' religious freedom rights. "Now the school has created a religious exception to the dress code because of our lawsuit," Rutherford says, "and they're also going to require teachers to undergo training."
The attorney believes the settlement with the district should serve as a warning to schools that they cannot bar people from wearing items that are important to their religion. "Hopefully schools will start waking up and saying, 'We've got to treat religious people fairly,'" he says.
In fact, Rutherford's president notes, several groups took great interest in the case, recognizing its importance in the area of preserving the constitutional rights of people from all faiths. "Six or seven months after we had filed the lawsuit, the Justice Department contacted us and said they would like to intervene in the case, and we said that would be good," he says.
The Institute found that many others were equally eager to join in pushing for a favorable outcome in the case, including several religious groups.
"The American Jewish Congress also had intervened, and there were a number of Muslim groups," Whitehead says, "so there was a lot of support for this because different religions saw right away that this would apply to them. It would mean a Jewish student couldn't wear a yarmulke, and in some instances, that Christians couldn't wear crosses."
Rutherford Institute is hailing the settlement agreement with Muskogee School District as a victory for free speech and religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
