Some Norwegian authors have signed a statement against allowing police to wear the hijab.

Fucking idiots! This really makes me mad. Norway is hardly the most equal land in the world if it refuses to allow women to wear a headscarf on the job. And this is so typical for what passes for equal rights in Norway–everyone must be the same in order to be allowed to have those equal rights. That attitude is, in fact, incredibly discriminatory. It’s discriminatory towards everyone who doesn’t easily fit into Norwegian society’s idea of what a person “should” be like–the very people who most need to have their right to equality protected by the law!

And I am so sick of people in one group (e.g. self-righteous ethnic Norwegians) telling the people of another group (e.g. Muslim women) what their actions and symbols mean (e.g. that the hijab is a symbol of subjugation). I am so sick of the unquestioned Norwegian attitude that their way is best, that assimilation is the only option for people who are different. If hijabis can do the damned job, then they should be allowed to do it!

This reminds me a lot of another issue that got my hackles up recently: some people want to git rid of homework because it supposedly reinforces differences among students (the comments there are particularly interesting). Some in Norwegian society are so afraid of the idea that people are different, and especially that some people can be better at something than others, that they want to prevent smart kids from excelling. (Of course, this attitude doesn’t apply to sports.) When will people learn that ideology removed from reality never leads to good things?

People are different, period. To deny that fact implies that you believe that people who are different are somehow less valuable as human beings. In reality, the fact that people are different is a wonderful, wonderful thing! We do everyone in a society a service if we celebrate those differences rather than suppress them.