If Sikh Kids Can Bring Knives to School, Why Can’t Everyone Else?

Late
last week, administrators at a Washington state school district
decided to let a Sikh boy carry the kirpan on school property. The
kirpan is a ceremonial knife central to the Sikh faith; all
baptized Sikhs are expected to carry one.

The decision,
according to KING 5 News, merely confirmed standard practice.
“Plenty of Sikhs, both students and staff” have worn their kirpans
at school for years, it seems. Administrators recognized that this
is an exception to state and federal zero tolerance weapons
policies, which strictly prohibit guns and knives—even pretend
ones—anywhere near a school.

Predictably,
alarmists were alarmed:

One school volunteer named Shelby, who asked her last name not
be used, said respecting religion goes too far if it compromises
student safety.

“There’s no way I’d go back until the knife was gone,” she
said.

But there’s no way that allowing Sikhs to carry the kirpan
compromises safety. What does this woman fear? Some psychopath is
plotting a mass stabbing at her school, but feels the need to wait
for permission to carry a knife? That’s obviously absurd. And since
the mere presence of knives does not cause rationale people to lose
their minds and start stabbing willy-nilly, I can’t think of a way
in which letting Sikh students exercise basic religious freedoms is
a threat to anyone.

I find it irksome, however, that school administrators are
willing to recognize a faith-based exception to zero tolerance
weapons policies while vigorously enforcing them in every other
respect, even when other students have equally valid reasons to
carry knives. Administrators routinely punish—often with criminal
charges and expulsion—Boy Scouts who brought knives to school,

student-hunters with unloaded rifles in their car trunks, kids
who
merely wrote stories about weapons, and others who broke the
rules by accident. Consider the case of
Atiya Haynes, a 17-year-old Detroit girl who was expelled after
her principal performed a random search of her purse and discovered
a pocketknife. The pocketknife was a gift from her grandfather; she
had carried it during the summer, while biking across Detroit to
her job. Haynes had long since forgotten about it.

Do the Atiyas of the world really deserve fewer freedoms than
Sikh students? It’s true that different standards apply, since Sikh
students’ beliefs arguably receive special protection under the
First Amendment and federal law.

Regardless, if administrators are capable of empathizing with
the Sikh student’s plight, they should extend this common sense
evaluation to other students. All kids deserve relief from
draconian and nonsensical restrictions of their freedoms, not
just the faithful.