Covered Female Police Officers

This story just broke, and some folks in the blog world are not happy. Are female officers "2nd class" if they respectfully cover upon entering a mosque (or cathedral, for that matter)? Read the more full story on "uniform hijab" at the (UK) Times. Some bits I hadn't seen in many of the first stories out on this :

"... The £13 headscarves are embroidered with the West Country force's name and logo, and come in two colours — black for police officers and blue for community support officers. A spokeswoman insisted that they were not intended purely to cater for Muslim cultural sensibilities but were multi-faith.

" "They are designed to be used in any place of worship and can be used to cover the head or the shoulders. For example, plain clothes officers could use them to cover their shoulders in a Catholic Church, or they can be used to cover the head in synagogues," she said."

...

"The Metropolitan Police, the largest and most diverse UK force, said that it issued headscarves to its Muslim female officers but not to non-Muslim officers.

" "We have had these scarves for Muslim female officers for some time, but as far as officers going into mosques — if it was appropriate for them to wear a scarf they would do that. But I don't think there are any plans to issue 15,000-odd officers with a headscarf," a Met Police spokeswoman said."

As usual, the comments in any of these news stories or blog entries are replete with ignorant comments about Muslims or Islam, the (name your) government, "sensibilities" and "bending over backward," and even about headcoverings among professed Christians (whom - I need not remind anyone here - should have NO problem covering up in a church of any kind, as head covering is highly "recommended" by the Apostle of Christ Himself, Paul/Saul). So, if you reading these things doesn't make you want to post a corrective comment yourself, as always, keep to reading the articles only.