Above-One of the arrestees in police custody
Heigh ho, heigh ho. It's off to jail they go.
When I saw this bit of film, I thought I was watching a new episode of Jersey Shore. You can't make this stuff up, folks. Amusement park, women wearing hijabs not allowed on the roller-coaster, fights, cops injured. Here you go, reality show fans.
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/disturbance-at-rye-playland-20110830-LGF
I'll bet Pauly and Snooki were in the middle of it.
Oh, by the way; here is a related story coming out of Australia, which may help explain why an amusement park tries to regulate what you wear on certain rides.
The park has a policy of no hats, scarfs, etc... This is to prevent lawsuits when they get caught and kill the idiot wearing them.
ReplyDeleteIt is not an anti-Muslim policy.
No this is not an anti-Muslim policy.
ReplyDeleteThere might be an arguable application of RLUIPA, but I doubt that it is land use, per se, and definitely not institutionalized persons. If it is land use within the meaning of the law, then there might be a duty to make reasonable accommodations for religious head gear.
A burqa is a full length garment, not a hair covering, and since it was caught in the wheels of a go kart, it almost certainly caught at the lower hem, then pulled the woman out of the kart and strangled her.
Burqas are very rare in the United States. Hijabs could be accommodated by tucking them in, but then, they would be no more or less hazardous than baseball caps.
I doubt very much that police needed to throw two women to the ground. Five officers can block a gate perfectly well, even if the women are screaming. Now if they pulled out hatpins or spit in the officers face, that's another matter. Officers don't have to take that off of anyone. But if that happened, I think it would have been publicized.
Although the policy may well be reasonable and legally unassailable, it is worth remembering that from a religious perspective, asking a woman to remove her hijab is akin to telling a woman at a beach "we don't allow swimsuits here, someone got their swimsuit caught on a nail under the dock and drowned. You have to swim naked." I don't feel that way, but the women wearing the hijab did.
Read up on the woman temporarily detained in the Orange County jail overnight who won a suit under RLUIPA because the jail staff required her to remove her hijab with unrelated men present.