It doesn’t seem to me as if a hijab is quite in keeping with Abercrombie & Fitch’s image, but if this suit succeeds, the company will not long be free to make such decisions for itself.
“Teen at center of rights suit,” by Ginnie Graham for the Tulsa World, September 18 (thanks to all who sent this in):
A popular national chain of clothing stores is being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly not hiring a Muslim Tulsa teenager because she wears a hijab, a religiously mandated head scarf.
The EEOC filed the lawsuit Wednesday against Abercrombie & Fitch in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, modified in 1991, as the basis for the action.
The suit says that Samantha Elauf, 17, applied in June 2008 for a sales job at the Abercrombie Kids store in Woodland Hills Mall.
A district manager allegedly told her that the hijab, which Elauf wears in observance of her religious beliefs, did not fit the store’s image.
“Defendant refused to hire Ms. Elauf because she wears a hijab, claiming that the wearing of headgear was prohibited by its Look Policy, and, further, failed to accommodate her religious beliefs by making an exception to the Look Policy,” the lawsuit states.
Elauf went to the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Oklahoma, which helped her file a complaint with the EEOC in Oklahoma City.
No mention here, of course, of the fact that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman, as well as its chief spokesman, have made Islamic supremacist statements.
The Civil Rights Act protects people from discrimination based upon religion in hiring and in the terms of their employment, an EEOC press release says.
The law requires employers to reasonably accommodate the religious practices of an employee unless doing so would create an “undue hardship” for the employer.
And completely destroying the store’s image is evidently not an “undue hardship.”