JEWS IN EUROPE ARE IN A QUANDRY. Should they support bans on Muslim women wearing a hijab, niqab, or burka or should they support Muslim women who believe these modesty apparels are religiously necessary?
THE PROBLEM for Christians is that a ban on displaying religious identifiers also would ban such items as crosses and crucifixes — and ashes before Lent. As with the Jewish jewelry, such items must be concealed.
Kippot — yarmulkas — are, by Jewish chronology, relatively new. While wearing a head covering during prayers is mandated by hoary tradition, wearing a kippa at other times has been optional. As Jews, at least in the U.S., felt more confident and safe, more and more Jewish men started wearing kippot outside home and synagogue.
With the exception of some Ashkenazi super-Orthodox sects, most American Jewish men go to work with uncovered heads. (A kippa-wearing Jew in an Israeli company operating in the U.S. barely is tolerated.)
No governments, as far as this scrivener knows, are citing beards as “religious identifiers.” Men of all religions have worn beards for hundreds of years – Amish, Jews, Muslims, sundry Orthodox Christians, and others too numerous to mention. Even some atheists have been known to favor hirsute faces.
In the U.S. what a person wears might be covered by “freedom of religion,” the First Amendment to the nation’s Constitution.
But Europe is NOT America.
A European Union court recently ruled that wearing apparel indentifying a person’s religion may be cause for dismissal, however to avoid any claims of discrimination, a prohibition of one type apparel, e.g., a hijab, also is a prohibition against the wearing — or display — of any type of religious identification: kippot, crosses and crucifixes, Mogan Davids, taqiyahs, dastaars, chunnis and keskis (Sikh turban) . . . the list goes on and on. Some Sikh sects obligate both men and women to wear a hair covering.
If Europeans, and perhaps some North Americans, too, are afraid of Muslims, then perhaps it would be better to make laws that force a person to display some sign of their religious affiliation.
The hijab is an excellent identifier of Muslim women; the niqab and burka not so much only because the person beneath the face covering cannot easily be identified. Sultaana Freeman challenged the Florida law demanding to be allowed to wear a burka for her driver’s license photo. A license was issued and then suspended. Ms. Freeman went to court and lost. She then appealed and lost again. In July 2003, then Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation requiring that driver's licenses must include a picture of the driver's full face.
In Illinois, the Sikh organization went to court to force the state to allow its members to wear head coverings. A number of Web sites incorrectly published that at the same time, Muslim women won the right to wear a niqab or burka. Snopes clarifies the issue at some length. According to Snopes, the Illinois Religious Accommodation Guide covering driver’s licenses and other forms of state-issued ID specify that Muslims (and Sikhs) may wear head coverings (such as hijabs) in photographs, not face-covering garb (such as burqas).
On 25 August 2015, Henry Haupt (Deputy Press Secretary for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White) clarified in an email to Snopes that a person’s face cannot be obscured in a driver’s license photo:
As an aside, the Reddit site has a brief look at what a police officer may do if a niqab or burka-clad woman is stopped.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc., No. 14-86 that to prevail in a disparate-treatment claim based on religion under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a job applicant need show only that the applicant’s need for a religious accommodation was a motivating factor in the employer’s decision, not that the employer had actual knowledge of the need. (The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in favor of Abercrombie & Fitch because the woman for whom the EEOC brought the complaint failed to notify her employer of her requirement.
The issue was over a hijab, not a niqab or burka.
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