Associated Press

LINCOLN, Neb. — Sister Madeleine Miller applied for a high school teaching job in Nebraska thinking she would get judged on her credentials – not what she was wearing on her head.

The 37-year-old nun was shocked to learn that, under a little-known law nearly a century old, she couldn’t wear a habit in a public school classroom.

The vaguely worded state ban prohibits teachers from wearing any sort of religious garb, from burqas to yarmulkes.

“I could have been arrested, jailed, fined or had my license taken away if I had tried to teach,” Miller said.

Now, state lawmakers are looking to end the ban, which was passed in 1919 under pressure from the Ku Klux Klan amid a national wave of anti-Catholic sentiment.

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The law is rarely enforced but came to the attention of the senator whose district includes Norfolk Public Schools, where Miller had hoped to work.

Miller said a school administrator told her the district would be happy to hire her, but she couldn’t wear her habit in class.

Thirty-six states had adopted similar bans on religious garb at various points, but Nebraska and Pennsylvania are the only ones that have yet to repeal them, said Speaker of the Legislature Jim Scheer, sponsor of the repeal bill. Oregon abolished its ban in 2010.

Scheer, who spent nearly two decades serving on a local school board, said he had no idea the ban was still in place but argued that it violates teachers’ free-speech rights. Nebraska is also struggling to fill teacher shortages this year in 18 different fields, according to the state Department of Education.

Miller – who holds a Nebraska teaching certificate, a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State College in Nebraska and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago – ended up taking a job at a Catholic school in neighboring Iowa. She said she initially considered filing a lawsuit with help from the Thomas More Law Center, a national religious liberties group, but decided against it in hopes that lawmakers would fix the issue themselves.

Church rules require sisters to wear the habit virtually all of the time, except when working in a communist country or cleaning with harsh chemicals that could damage the blessed garments.


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