Written By : John Hawkins

This moronic woman should have no case because this is certainly not a violation of her First Amendment Rights,

Fatuma Hassan has just enough rice in her near-empty cupboards to make it through the month. The anger she felt when she lost her job in May has given way to a dull, nagging hunger.

Yet this soft-spoken 22-year-old became an unlikely hero within the Somali community when she and five of her Muslim co-workers were dismissed last month from the Mission Foods tortilla factory in New Brighton, Minn., for refusing to wear a new company uniform — a shirt and pants — they consider a violation of their Islamic beliefs.

“For me, wearing pants is the same as being naked,” Hassan said, noting the prophet Mohammed taught that men and women should not dress alike. “My culture, my religious beliefs, are more important than a uniform.”

…Religious discrimination complaints nationally have nearly doubled since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — a reflection, some argue, of the heightened state of anxiety and fear concerning Muslims. In Minnesota, Muslims filed 45 religious discrimination cases with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2007, up from just eight in 2004. The EEOC does not break down this data by ethnicity.

And many of the more publicized disputes in the area — including Target cashiers who declined to scan pork and cabdrivers refusing to transport passengers with alcohol — never made it to an EEOC filing.

This rule about pants is not Congress prohibiting the free exercise of religion, it’s not anti-Muslim, and it’s not aimed at anyone’s religion. It’s probably just a common sense rule designed to insure work place safety. You wear a long, flowing skirt on a factory floor, you may end up tangled up in a machine.

As for the cashiers who won’t ring up pork or the cabdrivers who won’t transport people with alcohol, that’s part of their job. For example, Target sells pork products. If you’re a cashier at Target, you’re going to have to ring those products up. If you feel that’s impossible for you because of your religion, then you can either,

#1) Ignore your religious beliefs and do it anyway.
#2) Accept that your religious beliefs prevent you from doing the activity and don’t take the job.
#3) Create your own store where they don’t sell pork products.

The same goes for the Somali woman in the tortilla factory. She can wear the pants, quit the job, or start her own specially designed tortilla company where wearing pants isn’t a problem. Heck, if she wanted, she could even mount a publicity campaign to try to get the company to change its policy. Christians do that sort of thing all the time.

But, what she shouldn’t be able to do is legally force the company to change the way it does business just to accommodate her religious beliefs. Given how many religions we have in this country and how litigious the population is, allowing that to happen would open up an enormous can of worms that we’d never be able to get closed.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin for the story.

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