Turkey’s headscarf ban is even worse than the above, because unlike wearing a cross or a religious bracelet, some Muslim women feel that wearing a headscarf is a religious requirement. A more apt analogy might be government officials forcibly preventing Christian students at American universities from going to church on Sunday.

In response to reasonable religious freedom requests from women who wear headscarves, Turkey’s anti-religious secularists seem to be borrowing sound bites from American Islamophobes. One secular member of Parliament said that allowing women to wear headscarves at universities “will ultimately bring us Hezbollah terror, Al Qaeda terror and fundamentalism.”

That’s like saying that Catholic students going to Mass on Ash Wednesday will lead to the IRA planting bombs on campus.