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| NY prisons sued over Muslim head covering ban |
| 2007-03-17 |
| The US Department of Justice's civil rights division filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against the New York Department of Correctional Services alleging the city's prisons discriminated against Muslim officers by barring them from wearing visible symbols of their faith on the job. The suit was filed Thursday in Manhattan on behalf of Abdus Samad N. Haqq, a prison guard from Brooklyn who was ordered in 2005 to stop wearing a kufi - a knitted skullcap that carries religious significance for many Muslim men - while at work. "Americans are not required to abandon their religious beliefs when they report for work," said Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim in a statement announcing the lawsuit. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #6 Let 'em wear their stinking kufis, just so long as they agree to forego all legal recourse if their lack of official headgear causes them to be mistaken for an escaped prisoner and shot on sight. There might be a whole mess of mistaken escape attempts after that, just sayin'. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-03-17 17:54 |
| #5 If they want an expression of their religious faith, they should do like me and wear Mohammed Underoos(tm). |
| Posted by: SteveS 2007-03-17 12:22 |
| #4 Geoffro, if an Orthodox Jewish prison guard wore a yarmulke (Yiddish word) or kippah (Hebrew), it would be small enough to fit completely under the uniform cap. I'd always understood it as intended to be a private, rather than public, statement of faith. The Muslim kufi is intentionally both dimensional and large, and anyone wearing it would be visibly out of uniform. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-03-17 11:33 |
| #3 What part of "uniform" does this bone head not get? A uniform is just that--uniform. If our soldiers in Iraq saw a person with somewhat of a uniform on topped by a kufi, that person might be taken for the enemy. I call this bullshit. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-03-17 10:21 |
| #2 The NYPD could stop this in a nanosecond if they designed a single religious head gear for use by both Muslims or Jews. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2007-03-17 10:14 |
| #1 Just curious: would a jewish officer be allowed to wear that beanie thing? If so, then I have no problem with the muslims wearing their kufti. I'm also fine if the decision is 'hats are not part of the uniform' as long as it's fair. |
| Posted by: Geoffro 2007-03-17 09:06 |