Limiting men’s hair length can be religious discrimination!

February 10, 2012 at 7:09 pm · Filed under Editorial, education, issues, Opinion

This is a follow up to my two previous articles:

The 1960′s called and they want their asshole school administrators back!

My e-mail to the Madison Academy

As I got to thinking about it I remembered reading an article somewhere that pointed out that there may be spiritual connections to wearing long hair.  Although those are not a factor in this case (because the student intends at some point to cut his hair and donate it to “Locks of Love”), I think it is worth pointing out that anyone that requires a male to cut their hair as a matter of policy just might be trampling on their constitutionally protected freedom of religion.  For an explanation as to why, I refer you to the following article.  I’m not sure if this is the site I originally saw it on, but it does sound a lot like the article I read some time back:

The Truth About Hair and why Indians would keep their hair long (indian in the machine)

Just a pertinent quote from the article (I took the liberty of cleaning up some punctuation and spelling flaws):

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue. Back in the Viet Nam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties,  Sally [name changed to protect privacy]  was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical hospital. He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder.  Most of them had served in Viet Nam.

Sally said, ”I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.  As I read the documents, I learned why. It seems that during the Viet Nam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities. Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious casualties and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ’sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ’sixth sense’, their ’intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ’read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas. Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.

You can read the rest of the article to find out more, but it would seem to me that this would have implications for ANYONE who is attempting to achieve some kind of spiritual enlightenment.  It would also explain why controlling and domineering religions want to force men to keep their hair short AND why they insist that women should be subservient to men!  The biggest fear of organized religion is that someday people will realize they don’t need organized religion and its entire structure (the clergy/priestly class).

Now, you may not agree that long hair has anything to do with spiritual enlightenment, but you don’t have to — the Bill of Rights grants both you and everyone else the right to practice the religion of your choosing.  And think about this, isn’t it generally accepted that women in our society tend to be more “spiritual” than men?  And the funny thing is that most “fundamentalist” churches discourage women from cutting their hair, yet want their men to be almost shorn, and then wonder why it’s only the women who show up for prayer meetings (at least with any enthusiasm)!

And yet, even the Bible itself (a part that the early church probably couldn’t edit out without people noticing, because it was also part of the Jewish scriptures), in Judges chapter 16 it tells the story of Samson and Delilah, and specifically how Samson lost all his strength when his hair was cut.  Now on one level, some would say this simply shows the strength of belief — if Samson believed that his hair gave him his strength, then he would believe that when it was cut off it made him weak, although the specifics of Joshua 16:20 suggest something else was at work here — he was weakened before he realized his hair had been cut!  You can read that passage in your favorite Bible version if you like (although I will note that the King James version makes no sense), but the last part basically says that “the Lord had left him” after his hair was cut, which is actually probably another way of saying that he was no longer able to “connect” to the spiritual realm.  Cutting his hair was kind of like pulling the plug on an Internet connection, to use a modern analogy.

And even today, many Jewish men wear their hair and beards long, which is one reason Jesus is often portrayed with a long hair and a long beard (however, many artists then go off the rails and show him as a blond-haired blue-eyed nordic, which is pretty ridiculous given the area in which he lived, unless maybe his genetic makeup wasn’t anything like that of the race he was born into.  I’ll leave you to ponder the possible implications of that, or why anyone would portray him in that way, but chances are that they at least got it right on the hair length).  What so funny to me is that many of the churches that hate long hair on men nonetheless have one or more large portraits of Jesus showing him with full flowing locks.  Can we say “hypocrisy”?!

But neither Samson, nor Jesus, nor for that matter, some modern Jewish boys would be welcome at the Madison Academy, it seems.  Why?  Well, possibly because Paul the fake apostle had an opinion (probably based on his life as a Pharisee) that it was shameful for men to wear long hair.  And who did Jesus call out as being the least spiritual people of his time?  The Pharisees and the Sadducees, of course — he had not one good word to say about either of those groups.  And if Paul didn’t just come up with this thing about short hair out of thin air, that probably means that the Pharisee men wore their hair short, which would explain why they were so out of touch with spiritual things.  And Paul also believed that women should wear their hair long, but should never be allowed to teach or preach to men!  And modern so-called “Christianity” is much more based on the writings of Paul than the teachings of Jesus, and most religious schools (including, perhaps, those that pretend to be secular so they can get taxpayer money?) require their male students to wear short hair, and impose a bunch of other rules meant to exert control over them.  I’m just making short logical hops here, not wide leaps.

So in effect, it may be that by requiring someone to wear short hair, you are denying them direct connection to the spiritual realm, and forcing them to go through gatekeepers and controllers (the pastors, priests, the clergy, etc.) who also usually have short hair, and didn’t Jesus talk about “blind guides” and the blind leading the blind?  Hmmm…  And whatever you do, don’t listen to those women and their crazy ideas about spirituality…  Hmmm…  (And isn’t it funny how that now that women are given more latitude to teach and preach in many churches, suddenly those churches no longer consider it shameful for women to have short hair!)

It’s my opinion that you don’t have to be Native American or an orthodox Jew to have a sincerely held belief that long hair can make you a more spiritual person.  Note that many Native Americans cannot grow beards (there’s a couple of different theories as to why that is) so their only option would be long hair, but since long beards would be quite unwelcome in most schools (and in most of American society) you could make the case that American males should be allowed to wear long hair as a matter of religious freedom.  And by the way, have you noticed that men are much more likely to have some type of baldness later in life than women, and they are also more likely to get dementia… and that when people get cancer and go through chemotherapy and their hair falls out, it’s about that same time they often start suffering a lot of other adverse effects?  I’m no medical expert here, but somebody should do a study to see if there’s any correlation between loss of hair and other mental or physical issues!

I will also point out that many talented musicians have long hair — if you’ve followed my logic so far, then you probably realize that the question one might ask is, does some of their musical inspiration come from having long hair?  And look at the photos of Albert Einstein – he wasn’t exactly a shorthair!  Could we benefit from having more scientists and engineers that had the freedom to wear their hair at longer lengths?  I have to wonder, if you looked at the greats of science and the arts of present and past generations, whether you could find any correlation between hair length and proficiency in their field (or what we might call “talent”)?  Even Hollywood seems to have figured out that long hair equates with unconventional creative genius (think “Doc” Brown from the Back to the Future films).

Now, again, I’m not trying to convert anyone to a different religion here — that’s not my point.  My point is that if you discriminate against someone because of hair length, you could well be practicing religious discrimination.

Oh, and to end on a somewhat humorous note, who are considered (by themselves, anyway) to be some of the most spiritual people around in modern times?

These guys:

The Amish (Note: not a real Amish male)

Okay, yeah, I know that’s not a real Amish man, but the Amish don’t like to be photographed so I had to make do! And of course, that’s really “Weird Al” Yankovic, who’s one of the most talented guys around today, and as it happens he has long hair. Could he be just as creative with shorter hair? Maybe, but I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to suggest that he cut his locks.

Maybe the Madison Academy doesn’t want to produce talented people. Maybe they only want to produce bland, ordinary, compliant people. All I know is that I would not want to see any of my grandchildren going to a place like that!

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