A young Muslim woman has sued Abercrombie & Fitch after she was fired for violating the clothier’s “look policy,” which the company interpreted as not permitting Muslim headscarfs.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue weighed in today:
As a private company, Abercrombie & Fitch has a legal right to determine its own policies. But from a moral perspective, what it did to this woman is a joke. This is the same company that directs its models not to wear clothes while selling its line of clothing. Indeed, it can’t even sell men’s cologne these days without dabbling in soft porn.
As I said about its 2003 Christmas catalog, “the photos more closely resemble an ad for a nudist colony.” Two years earlier, it released a catalog titled, “A&F XXX Adventure: Get Wet Set & Go on Spring Break.” It was so replete with male and female nudity that it had to put a “Warning Label” on the cover.
At bottom, Abercrombie & Fitch has a religion problem. In the aforementioned 2001 “Spring Break” catalog, it advised readers to adorn their spring break hotel rooms with “palm fronds” that can be taken “for free if you crash a Catholic mass [sic] on Palm Sunday.” In the same issue, a creepy cult movie was reviewed, and to the utter delight of the reviewer, readers were instructed to learn how to “make wry comments after bashing a dead nun’s head to a pulp.”
So it’s not just Muslims that Abercrombie & Fitch likes to bash. My guess is that if some smart-aleck woman wore nothing but a loincloth—using a hijab to cover her genitals—she would pass the company’s “look policy” with flying colors. They really are a sick bunch.
