l Elaine Witt l

Driver's license rule spurs debate

Commentary by ELAINE WITT
BIRMINGHAM POST-HERALD

It's not clear exactly when the state of Alabama began requiring Muslim women, Catholic nuns and chemotherapy patients to remove their head coverings while having driver's license photos shot.

A spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety said the policy was first put in writing in March 2003 but was "an unwritten policy" before that.

Sister Mary John Paul O'Flanagan, a member of the Sister Servants of the Eternal Word, a Catholic religious order in Irondale, said she first encountered the policy on Feb. 6 when she and another sister tried to renew their licenses.

"We went down to get our driver's licenses renewed at Center Point, and we were told we had to remove our veils," said Sister Mary John Paul whose brown and white habit covers part of her head but leaves her face, her neck, her forehead and the front of her hair exposed.

"I pulled out my driver's license and showed her (a DPS employee) my last driver's license photo, and she said it was policy now that you could wear nothing on your head — no scarf, no hat."

The sisters left without their licenses and haven't decided what to do.

"It expired on January 8 and we didn't realize it because I'm not a regular driver," she said. "They said you have a 60-day grace period to drive in Alabama. But you can't drive in any other state with an expired license. I said our problem is identification. We can't get on a flight with an expired license."

She said her main concern is for her colleague, Sister Rita Marie McPhee, who expects to be called to her hometown of Boston soon to visit her ill father.

"If her father gets to the point where he wants to see her before he dies, we're going to have a hard time getting her on a flight."

The nuns' experience, no doubt, has been repeated throughout Alabama since the DPS began enforcing the rule.

The DPS also is requiring a bare head for non-drivers seeking state-issued photo ID cards, which also can be used to board commercial airliners.

If this is the first you've heard of this cruel and stupid rule, or if you're wondering if you went to sleep in Alabama and woke up in France, you're not alone.

Maybe you've got a foggy memory of a 2003 Florida case in which an Islamic woman tried to get a driver's license while wearing a veil over her face. Her request, logically, was denied.

The much more restrictive Alabama rule was implemented quietly, for unclear reasons, and word has only begun to filter out after incidents like that of the two sisters from Irondale.

On Wednesday, a group of Muslim women spoke against the rule before the Alabama Legislative Council, a committee of House and Senate members with some oversight over state administrative rule changes.

Legislators criticized the policy but said they could do nothing about it since DPS had not brought it before them as a rule change

"Their legal counsel couldn't even talk about it in detail, but yet it's being enforced across the state," Sen. Vivian Figures, D-Mobile, told the Associated Press after the hearing. "And they said they're still looking at the constitutionality of it."

It would be unfair to say this rule was born out of post-Sept. 11 anti-Muslim hysteria; Lt. Col. Mike Coppage, head of the DPS and a former Birmingham police chief, has not explained exactly how the rule came to be.

Martha Earnhardt, a DPS spokeswoman, said the rule covers any hair covering, including wigs, without exception.

Asked how a driver's license examiner could determine whether an applicant is wearing a wig, Earnhardt paused.

"I don't know how to answer that. Sometimes that's clearly apparent, and in other cases it's not," she said.

Indeed, it would seem that a disguise artist wearing a wig would be able to fool the scalp police more easily than a man or woman wearing a scarf, hat or turban for religious reasons.

An airline official confronting a turbaned head, for example, would be inclined to take a close look at both face and photo before deciding whether they matched. A wigged individual with a stolen ID, on the other hand, could more easily slip through without scrutiny.

But if logic were applied here, someone would have to explain how a wig or hat makes an individual less identifiable than a box of Miss Clairol, a permanent wave or an impulsive head-shaving episode.

If logic applied, religious leaders of all faiths would view this rule as an attack on religious freedom, and they'd be demanding that Coppage and his boss, Gov. Bob Riley, do something about it.

Elaine Witt's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in the Birmingham Post-Herald.

From: http://www.postherald.com/witt.shtml