Highschool student states her nose ring is religious.Follow

Good point, individulism is important, but peircing's, blue hair and tatoos will only land you a job at a fast food joint, or maybe a tatoo shop. Im not against tatoo's though. If parents dont prepare their kids, and the schools dont, then who will?

My bad, sorry for implying that.



Got some studies handy to back up that assertion?



That's certainly true. But I'm not claiming that it's a perfect solution. Kids will always find something to bully about, after all. But I do think that this makes it a little more difficult.

Edited, Sep 17th 2010 5:16pm by Eske

This IMO. Tattoos and piercings tend to haunt people. Why tattoo removal is becoming such a huge industry, and why you'd easily make 6 figures if you decide to go into it now. It's like 10k/square inch is the last number I heard.

Her religion does, apparently.

Agreed, religion should never be allowed to make an exception to the rules.

Maybe I misread something, but it appeared as though an earlier court ruling dealing with the same religious group determined that their faith did not specifically require that they must wear or display any specific modification at any given time and in any given place. My earlier point was merely that their faith at least does include nose piercings within its doctrine, whereas the other two religions mentioned don't. Those are purely cultural trappings from a specific region and have nothing to do with the religions themselves.

They have *more* grounds for this than Muslims or Hindi's, but IMO they don't have sufficient grounds either.



I don't think it's that black and white though. If a religious requirement exists and some government entity (like a public school) creates rules against it specifically to prevent that religious requirement from being performed and with no other reasonable explanation, then that's a violation of the first amendment. The opposite is true as well though. If a religion is formed with or adopts requirements specifically to buck the existing public rules, then it should not be granted protection under the 1st amendment.

I've presented the example in the past of a religion embracing nudity. Should people who adopt that faith be allowed to walk around nude anywhere they want? Even at a school? I think most of us would agree that this is taking the concept of freedom of religion too far. But that's not to say that the principle doesn't exist. It's a matter of reasonable examination of the case at hand.


In this case, I don't think she has sufficient grounds. There's no reason why she can't take the piercing out while on school property. Lots of kids (including myself) had piercings and attended schools in which they violated the dress code. It's not like taking them out presents a hardship or anything regardless of whether it's a matter of faith. My biggest issue here was the double standard (and a false one at that) of apparently allowing some faiths to do this, but not this one.

At 14 you can't get a nose ring unless your parents give consent. If her parents are ok with it, the school really shouldn't have much say. If she takes the nose ring out, the hole will grow back and that will waste the parents money. They should just make her wear a band-aid over it like most places of business do nowadays.

Don't misunderstand me: if a school has a dress code and a parent is ok with their kid wearing a shirt that has profanity on it, that's a different story. A shirt can be worn anywhere else, so that's not exactly a waste.

To me, this is sort of a case of the school overriding a parent's decision. I'm not really ok with that. I can understand restrictions on what kind of studs she can have in her nose, or saying it needs to be covered, but saying she can't have it at all is a bit extreme, in my opinion.

If your boss/sales person shows up in my office, looking for me to invest in his company, or to solicit my business and he's in jeans, I'm going to pass on him and take the ones who respect me enough to show up and act like they care.

The point your missing is that there are still lots of people/companies who care about appearance and expect you to carry yourself in a certain way and by not abiding by those expectations, you eliminate potential clients. Now, maybe your company has made that decision and is fine with it, but the point is, they made the decision and chose to eliminate a portion of their potential client base.

Edited, Sep 18th 2010 12:50pm by Uglysasquatch

All kids should grow up to wear ties, apparently. Winners.

Not at all. But they should be taught to dress and act appropriately.

Appropriately? For whom? And why? Just to fulfill the expectations of others, so they can eek out a few extra bucks every payday? Personally, I'll be disappointed if my kid lives life as a vicarious vessel. I want little autonomous people, not little automatons who act like people should.

Because you learn so much in high school, right? That's where education happens.

Again, I'll be disappointed too if all my kid does to "rail against the establishment" is pierce his or her own nose.

Now I could understand the dress code when I was a kid. It was about not allowing kids to display their gang affiliations, because that could be dangerous, but I don't get the need to control kids to this extent. Yeah, we as adults are more powerful than you, kiddos, and apparently so insecure we need to demonstrate that truth at every opportunity. Honestly, if the hardest lesson my kid waits till adulthood to learn is that they have to wear a collar and take the jewelry out of their lip to be taken seriously by spineless suckers I'll feel pretty good. I mean, kids learn from every angle that society demands they fall in lockstep or suffer the wrath of its disapproval. Go ahead and pierce your eyebrows, kids, and shave your fUcking heads and wear eyeliner around your lips, while you're at it. But while you're under my roof you're not going to kill any more cops.

Really? Don't be shocked when your kids grow up to be as boring as you.