Strong and Weak Evaluations

This brings me back to my earlier scenario: the teacher in Dortmund wearing a jersey of the Bayern Munich soccer club. The intuition that the educational au­thority may forbid him from wearing the jersey, I believe, will find a sufficient basis in the concrete danger that it represents to disrupting the peace and mak­ing orderly class instruction impossible.

Some liberals thus also argue that we should not differentiate between reli­giously significant and other items of clothing. We should instead treat all cloth­ing as though it stood solely for preferences in taste that do not concern the state. Whether earrings, t-shirts, jerseys, jeans, long or short or dyed hair, or no hair at all, berets, Jewish skull-caps, crosses, or veils: the state should abstain from any hermeneutic of the appearance that its employees may present. And it must con­sider that each of them has a right to the free development of their personality and that any interference in that right requires justification. In that regard, it can­not suffice for an educational authority to dislike a religious message. Otherwise, it would consequently also be free to prohibit other items of clothing, say the Prada brand, if it found it to be pretentious. So, aside from emergency cases: hands off from any clothing regulations in the public sector!

Ethical liberalism cannot make it so easy on itself. Even from its perspective, as I have attempted to show, there are good reasons for allowing women to wear the veil at public schools. But the reasons have to do with the special signifi­cance of religious convictions.

Why, for example, should the British state be generally receptive to the rights claim of a Sikh^[336] to wear the traditional turban while serving on the police force? The best answer is that this item of clothing represents a conviction that is cen­tral for the person’s self-understanding. It would be a misunderstanding to sup­pose that the state is being partial to the Sikh religious community by making an exception for them. It only takes party for the possibility to live in accordance with whatever reasoned convictions determine one’s identity. It takes party not for a What, but to a How; namely: how people can lead their lives. And the state is thereby treating them if not equally, then still as equals.

A liberal state should thus take some freedoms much more seriously than others. And it must weigh the obligations to justifying any interference into the realm of personal liberties quite differently. While the state is not seriously offending the autonomy of its citizens when designating a road a one-way street, it is a much more serious affair when it meddles in citizens’ freedom of belief. This second freedom stands, pars pro toto, for any and all such practices and be­liefs that give meaning to a person’s life. Equality of regard and respect includes being sensitive to differences that affect practices and beliefs concerning a per­son’s self-understanding, given that these differences are morally defensible and that citizens can abide by them without therefore being irrational.

This appears to me to be the best basis for arguing that federal state legis­lators and their educational authorities should opt for a moderately multicultur­alist treatment in all veil cases. Solutions that are moderately multi-cultural are not based on blindness to the possibility of irrational and morally wrong prac­tices and convictions. A laissez-faire policy that effectively fosters disintegration and exposes Muslim girls to fundamentalists in schools would surely be the wrong response to the fact of religious pluralism. But until the opposite is pro­ven, we should assume that an adult Muslim woman knows what she is doing if she wears the veil and that she means what she says when she states that she is not wearing it for missionary or Islamist purposes.