Suspended for a nose ring
23rd September 2010
A piercing case in North Carolina is brewing after a 14-year-old high school student received yet another suspension for wearing a nose stud. This isn’t your average rebellious teenager, though. Ariana Iacono and her mother are members of a group called the Church of Body Modification.
‘Church of Body Modification’? (I am not making this up….)
Ivey describes the church as a non-theistic faith that draws people who see tattoos, piercings and other physical alterations as ways of experiencing the divine.
“We don’t worship the god of body modification or anything like that,” he said. “Our spirituality comes from what we choose to do ourselves. Through body modification, we can change how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about the world.”
In other words, it’s a transparent scam to sweep body modifications under the rug of religion so as to get the benefit of the whole ACLU-iverse.
One of the major disadvantage of government-run schools is that they are famously vulnerable to this sort of system-gaming. For example:
In 1999, a federal court in North Carolina ruled that the Halifax County school system had violated such hybrid rights of Catherine Hicks and her great-grandson by forcing the boy to wear a school uniform.
Hicks’ religious beliefs held that uniformity is linked to the anti-Christ, a belief Halifax schools rejected. But the court ruled in her favor, and ordered the school system to include a religious exemption in its dress code policy.