In a complaint filed Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and law firm Baldwin & Vernon in Independence said the gun stand at Frontier Justice atop Lee enforces its dress code in a discriminatory manner. which disproportionately affects Muslim women.
AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): In a complaint filed Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and law firm Baldwin & Vernon in Independence said the gun stand at Frontier Justice atop Lee enforces its dress code in a discriminatory manner. which disproportionately affects Muslim women.
Rania Barakat and her husband traveled to Frontier Justice on January 1, 2020 to shoot at their shooting range. According to the lawsuit, Barakat was told that she would not be allowed to use the stove unless she removed her hijab, a religious head covering worn by some Muslim women.
Frontier Justice officials claimed in a statement posted to Facebook that the dress code rules, which have been in place since the store opened in 2015, are designed to protect people from burns from depleted brass and are not discriminatory.
The shooting range requires shooters to remove all headgear except forward facing baseball caps. A store manager explained that the shrapnel could burn the hijab and the skin.
The couple told the director that they had used several other firing ranges without any issues caused by the hijab, and that people wore long sleeves and shirts that covered their necks to protect them from shrapnel, according to the report. trial.
The director said the shooting range had different rules, depending on the lawsuit. The couple left the store after the manager became “aggressive and loud,” the costume reported.
The lawsuit said Frontier Justice’s policy was to refuse Muslims wearing the hijab, citing several social media posts from other Muslims regarding the refusal to use the shooting range. He also said Frontier Justice’s Instagram posts showed customers wearing baseball caps turned inside out, hats and scarves.
“It is totally unacceptable for a commercial establishment to deny service to customers because of their religious beliefs – and that is exactly what Frontier Justice has done,” said Moussa Elbayoumy, Chairman of the Board of Directors of CAIR -Kansas, in a statement. Claiming that a hijab somehow presents a security issue is just a bad excuse to try to justify a pattern of discriminatory treatment of Muslim women.
The Frontier Justice statement said it had not received any complaints about its policies, except for Barakat. It also offers Muslims who wish to wear the hijab the option of using a shooting simulator or wearing a swimming hijab.
“It saddens us to have anyone say that we are not inclusive, as we serve all races and religions every day in all of our stores. We are proud of this fact and strongly believe in America and the Second Amendment for every American. Full stop, ”said Bren Brown, president of Frontier Justice, in the statement.
CAIR in July asked the US Department of Justice to investigate civil rights practices at Frontier Justice.
The lawsuit calls on the federal court to find that Frontier Justice’s policies on wearing the hijab violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act and prohibit the gun stand and its employees from discriminating against of anyone because of their religion.
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