Nothing you guys say can match what I’ve read in the Old Testament. I’m desensitized.
Depends. There are cases where there are requirements for one’s garments to e.g. have certain level of fire resistance (to not burn and not melt onto skin, which is fairly icky to deal with). Then there are cases where one has to be able to wear a gas mask, which may not fit properly on an unshaved face.
I’d say physics (which includes material properties) flatly trumps religion anywhere.
There is ample evidence that wearing certain garments is important to people of certain cultures, and that’s what we need evidence of to make this kind of decision.
Reading your exchange with @albill I see you are in favour of allowing people to wear their religious headwear (against bans on hijabs, etc., which is good because that’s BS). I think the function of religion in that kind of exemption (from a school dress code or a service industry uniform) isn’t so much undue deference to religion, but more of an explanation that people understand. Like I said above, my experience is that people tend to respect the decision to be vegetarian for philosophical reasons as much as they respect religious special diets (that is, some respect it a lot and some not at all).
Basically, when someone says they do something that we don’t understand, we want to understand why they do it. We know what a religion is, we’ve heard of vegetarianism, we know the world has pacifists in it. When someone says, “Hey, I need to wear this for my religion” we basically know what they mean, and we understand that it is important to them. When someone says, “I need to wear this because it’s very important to me” they are likely to be perceived as an outsider and their feelings are likely to be discounted. I think it’s shitty that we are like that, but I also don’t think we actually have all that much deference to religion so much as we are accommodating of people when we understand them, and we are bad at understanding one another unless we can put people in a pre-defined bucket.
@LDoBe - I see what you did. By liking my comment you have proven my thesis wrong!
That’s not in the Constitution. In fact, it’s a pretty straight-forward argument against, to say that the government has the right to grant special privileges (such as tax-exempt and law-exempt status) to some belief systems and not others.
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