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The Justice Department announced Tuesday the government's civil rights lawyers have jumped into a legal case to support a Muslim girl's right to wear a head scarf in a public school.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Alex Acosta said government lawyers would support 11-year-old Nashala Hearn, a sixth-grade student who has sued the Muskogee, Oklahoma, Public School District for ordering her to remove her head scarf, or hijab, because it violated the dress code of the Benjamin Franklin Science Academy, which she attended.
The girl continued to wear her hijab to school and was subsequently suspended twice for doing so.
I applaud the Justice Department, and Attorney General Ashcroft for intervening in this case. According to the complaint, the school's dress code allows students to wear some things on their heads but not others. It does not specifically mention the hijab, the traditional Muslim headcovering for women, but school officials held that it fell within the policy. The school's justification for the policy is that the ban on headgear is designed to prevent gang activity.
If these facts are correct, there is a good chance that the school will lose, as they should. The limited nature of the school's policy demonstrates that it is not completely opposed to all head coverings, and the hijab has no relationship to gang activity. So the policy may violate the equal protection of the laws because it discriminates between permitted secular reasons and religious reasons for wearing headgear. There would be a more difficult federal case if no headgear was permitted under any circumstances, but there still might be an argument that the policy violates Oklahoma state law.