Salem, OR – After more than two hours of charged testimony and debate, the House Education Committee voted 6-4 this afternoon in favor of a bill that would end Oregon’s 87-year ban that makes teachers the only people in Oregon who cannot wear religious dress at work.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Most lawmakers on the panel said they struggle over the question of how schools would and should handle cases in which observant Muslims, Jews or even Wiccans assert their right to cover their heads or wear robes in accordance with their religious faith. Balancing the rights of children, who form a captive and trusting audience for the teacher, could be difficult or impossible, bill opponents and some lawmakers said.
But committee chairwoman Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, vice chair Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, and member Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay, a retired principal, said they had no reservations about ending the ban. House Speaker Dave Hunt, D-Gladstone, is the chief proponent of House Bill 3686.
“Religious minorities are being discriminated against currently,” Dembrow said. “The legitimate contribution they can make to our communities as teachers is being curtailed… Just because a woman is wearing a head covering, that is not bullying, that is not proselytizing.”
A panel convened by the Oregon Department of Education and the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries would spend the next year hashing out nitty-gritty rules to try to guide schools and protect both teachers and schoolchildren. The ban would lift on July 1, 2011.
The primary opponents of the change are the leaders of the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. They fear children will be proselytized if their teachers wear headscarves, crosses, Wiccan robes and other faith-related items.
Charlie Hinkle, a lawyer testifying for the civil liberties group, drew a mild rebuke from Gelser with his testimony indicating that children and parents could be frightened and driven from the public schools if teacher are allowed to wear burkas, turbans or “full regalia like the mother superior in the Sound of Music.”
“About every other year a new private school opens in Oregon,” Hinkle testified. Christian parents “have created those private Christian schools largely because they feel that the public school system is hostile to their religious beliefs. Those parents and people like them are going to feel even more so if their first-graders are being taught by Muslim women in burkas and Sikh teachers in turbans… I look forward to the day when the orthodox Jewish parent welcomes the fact that his 6-year-old daughter is going to be a captive audience in the Muslim teacher’s or the Wiccan teacher’s classroom for 180 days a year.”
Gelser responded directly to the substance of his testimony, something she rarely does when presiding over a hearing. “I just feel compelled to comment,” she said. “I am a parent of young children. We happen to be a Christian family, fairly actively so.I would be alarmed if my children were frightened to meet a Muslim woman in a classroom. I would be frustrated to hear any expression in a public school that someone felt unwelcome or unsafe because there were Muslims that were teaching there.”
Most of the lawmakers who voted no on the bill said they are willing to consider lifting the ban on teacher religious dress but that the issue has moved too fast and needs further study.
The bill now heads to the House floor.
Good. Very good.
This law came into being in 1923. The stated purpose of the backers was to harm Catholics. Oregon was a strong Klan State back then. The Klan wanted to make it illegal for nuns – many of whom taught school – to wear their religiously required clothing.
A lot of folks here will be upset because Muslim women took the lead in challenging this law. And anything that Muslims want, they will say, is bad for the Jews. That’s unbelievably short sighted. Any laws which allow religious discrimination will be used against us.
It is about time! Our family is Sephardic and I cover my hair with a scarf according to the rulings of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef shlita and other Sephardic Rabbis.
I was recently detained, thoroughly searched and ejected from a convention center where I was a registered attendee at an industry Trade Show because as security and the Police told me “the other participants are uncomfortable with you”.
Do I have to choose between following the Rav of my choice and entering a public building?
I am glad to see this. I am sefardi and I cover my hair with a scarf. I teach in a NYC public school and it would be really awful if we had such a law. The argument that my coming to school in a long skirt and a headscarf is somehow ‘proselytizing’ the kids is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. My students know I’m Jewish but I have never once discussed my religion in class because it not the place to do so (and anyway, that would be illegal).