By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--June 17, 2015
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This is one of those things where - maybe because I've never been in the military - I don't see the big deal. I guess the reason you're not supposed to have facial hair or where things like turbans is that they're trying to eliminate the distinctions between soldiers, so you identify as a member of the Army and not as you as an individual.Sikh leaders have long urged the Department of Defense to be more accommodating and a federal court decision issued last Friday could signal a move toward more religious accommodations and exemptions in the armed forces. On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Iknoor Singh, a Sikh Hofstra University student, could join the U.S. Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program at his university without having to contravene his religious principles. "I didn't believe it at first when I heard about the decision," Singh said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press Monday. "It was kind of surreal. This is something I have been fighting for two or three years. I'm excited and nervous; very excited to learn."
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Singh was first denied a religious accommodation in 2013, which would have allowed him to enroll in the ROTC program and exempted him from grooming policies on the grounds that his exemption would have "an adverse impact on the Army's readiness, unit cohesion, standards, health, safety, or discipline." Several rejected waivers later, the Army changed its decision and told Singh he could seek an exemption only after he enlisted as a cadet, which meant he would have to violate his faith in order to apply for an exemption. The 20-year-old finance and marketing major said he had always wanted to join the military in a 2014 interview with TIME following the American Civil Liberties Union and United Sikhs' announcement of a joint lawsuit against the U.S. Army on Singh's behalf.It's never made sense to me that you would want to join an organization whose rules you could not accept. You might get a court to force them to make an exception for you (and Singh obviously did), but the court can't change the organization's culture - and from the day you arrive, you're the guy who expects to be treated special and thinks he should be above the rules. There's no court ruling that's going to get him out of that. And even if I'm not necessarily sold on the rules that were struck down here - this coming from the guy you see in the photo above with a clean-shaven face and short-cropped hair, mind you - I'm very much in favor of the military having the freedom to make the rules they think are necessary for the fulfillment of their mission. For the better part of the past decade, the courts have thought they've known better than the commanders what those rules should be - and the decisions are never based on how to win wars. They're always based on social concerns that have nothing to do with the mission of the military. Do you feel safer knowing that American soldiers can wear beards and turbans? It's not that big a deal to me, but I don't feel safer knowing that when the military command structure thinks a rule is necessary, they can't impose it without the risk that some federal judge will overrule them. Nor should you.
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