Muslim-American woman kicked out of Family Dollar store for wearing hijab and niqab

Clicking on the spoiler blur to see what you were hiding immediately took me from this site to the auto-play video on YouTube.

That’s not good!

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Don’t forget to give them some candy first!

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Really, an ad hominem is the best you can do? Meanwhile, you might try reading comprehension: my statements were for all subgroups of people who’ve been asssigned a subservient position in society, not just Muslim women – or, for that matter, women of any number of current-day religions which place men above women.

How is that an ad hominem? He’s not trying to attack your argument by discrediting you, he’s trying to point out that you, unlike Ms. Ishaq, are speaking for people (and I quote: “This poor woman doesn’t even understand how badly she is afraid of being open to the world.”) who have not chosen you to speak for them.

Of course, she might have chosen you to speak for her; you refer to her by her first name, which is either a sign of familiarity or disrespect. I’m sure you would never offer her disrespect, so it must be the case that you are a close personal friend of Ms. Ishaq.

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if there were a religious denomination for which the wearing of the hoodie held sectarian significance your rhetorical question might be more pointful.

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Yes, some sex workers consider their jobs less demeaning than alternative employment offered to them. You obviously have a problem with a woman choosing to do something you find demeaning, or you wouldn’t have considered it an appropriate comparison.

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None of these laws would stand against the first amendment right to religious garb, regardless.

Citation?

If the average person is not committing these crimes, then I’d say there is no reason to inconvenience them about it. FWIW I have usually lived in the NY/NE area and have never once seen a “no hoodies” sign anywhere.

I am! Religion tends to only be protected if it is a large organized religion, and those are notorious for having less to do with actual religious practice than informal or folk religions. Since there has never been any way for people to prove what they believe, it is always a culture war shitshow.

I am sure that it certainly can be. The problem is that the US, not unlike India, claims to be multicultural. So people need to conduct themselves in public with the maturity of knowing that looking “USian” is going to mean drastically different things to people depending upon where they come from. But the US has long peddled in deliberately false, misleading multiculturalism built around an implicit Eurocentric bias. For example, people were not even legally allowed to immigrate from Asian countries until just a few decades ago because they were deemed “too different” for Western values. Why “assimilate” into a European cultural paradigm if you aren’t in Europe?

That’s I think what is central to the problem. People are claiming to push for assimilation under the pretext that it is more civilized - yet they do this to excuse not being able to control their own knee-jerk reactions in daily interactions. Confronting a person who is minding their own business because they lack the maturity and self-discipline to manage their anxious impulses is the very antithesis of most models of “civilized behavior” - including those the US claims to subscribe to.

As I had mentioned elsewhere, I think that the key to overcoming xenophobia is knowing the difference between simply feeling some internal social awkwardness or anxiety, and somebody actually doing something to you. It’s why we hear about police shooting people when there was no prior violence. Each person is responsible for what they feel and how they act, because pragmatically one can’t be responsible for anyone else. There really never is anybody making you feel happy, afraid, etc - it’s simply your emotional state in that situation. Making one’s own feelings of anxiety into the problem of others who were minding their own business is confrontational for its own sake, impolitic and unacceptably provincial for a country composed 99% of immigrants.

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The [Nashala Hearn] (Nashala's Story | whitehouse.gov) case, where a school tried to enforce the “no hats” rule on a student wearing a hijab, and was sued. The school board ended up having to change their dress code.

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That’s not a full face covering. So, not analogous.

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By all means, if you can find a more relevant precedent, please let us know.

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It’s not “analogous” because it’s an exact citation for religious expression of dress being protected by constitutional law.

Thank goodness America isn’t the hellhole you’d be most comfortable with.

Your “nuh uh” lowbrow rebuttals to actual precedent are a great example of the pseudoskeptic “movement”, though.

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You aren’t getting the distinctions. A headscarf is not a full face mask. A mere headscarf can fall under “reasonable accommodation” because merely covering one’s hair isn’t a fundamental change that utterly conceals one’s identity. There is a legitimate secular purpose for a business to require people not to obscure their faces. So, as I correctly noted, your citation is not analogous. Or as lawyers would say, the case is not on all fours.

Let’s take the opposite extreme to make this principle clearer. Let’s say that you are a member of a religion that requires you to wear the complete opposite of a niqab, requiring you to cover only your eyes, so you go around naked except for sunglasses. By your argument, businesses must all allow that because the headscarf decision is “an exact citation for religious expression of dress being protected by constitutional law”.

You can’t genericize legal rulings. The ruling is not a universal one allowing anyone who shouts “Religion!!!11!!” do whatever they want no matter what. The details matter. A headscarf is not a full face mask.

That’s not actually an argument. That’s just you trying to poison the well with an ad hominem.

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All I did was paste the youtube link (which as usual put the little embed picture there) then blurred it using the spoiler tags. If that somehow enables auto-play then it is probably a matter for Jeff et al.

At least it was safe for work, unless someone there has an ashtray phobia.

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yeah, I fully understand that. That’s why I said I’d be sued and lose. But, as a libertarian, I don’t think that the government should force me to do business with the likes of Fred Phelps.

Rights are a balancing act. The same rule you are objecting to is required to keep business that are public accommodations from refusing to serve Jews, blacks or other protected classes.

You are still free to discriminate who can join your church, private club, etc.

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In general, I believe that these full body coverings are enforced on women by a religion that sees them as less than equal to men. The dude does not abide. I’m against it.

Against what? Against Muslim women deciding for themselves what to wear?

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Actually I regularly have to talk to muslim women in hijab/niqab and their husbands, predominantly from Iraq or Syria.

And for every Ms. Ishaq among them there are twenty who aren’t. I know their families and husbands and see who is “empowered”, most often it isn’t the woman.

So when someone like Trump spouts racist Dreck about Mexicans in general a Mexican shouldn’t feel insulted because it isn’t an insult specifically aimed at him personally? Bullshit.