By: Erin Drenning

A North Carolina teenager made national news Wednesday when the ACLU filed a lawsuit on her behalf, claiming her public high school violated the girl’s constitutional rights by suspending her four times this year because she wears a piercing in her nose.

The Johnston County school system has a dress code that bans facial piercings, among numerous other fashion choices it considers to be distracting or disruptive. Reaching back into the recesses of my brain to my second semester of Con Law, I seem to recall that school dress codes will hold up under judicial scrutiny so long as they are reasonable and rationally related to a legitimate educational purpose, such as maintaining safety or discipline.

Surely Clayton High School isn’t the first in the nation to put an across-the-board content-neutral ban on body art, claiming it’s distracting to others and disrupts the pedagogical process. So why did the ACLU choose this case?

The crux of their argument is that 14-year-old Ariana Iacono’s nose stud isn’t a fashion statement, it’s an article of faith. She and her mother, Nikki, are members of the Church of Body Modification, which teaches that alterations such as tattoos, brandings and piercings “strengthen the bond between mind, body, and soul.”

Typically, the wearing of religious attire is student conduct that should be accommodated by schools under the First and Fourteenth Amendments — something that Johnston County clearly recognized when it wrote an exemption for students who deviate from the dress code based on a “sincerely held religious belief.”

Though I haven’t spoken to school administrators, I can imagine their response when Iacono, her mother and her 22-year-old minister  — who works part-time in a piercing and tattoo shop and has a laundry list of his own body modifications — explained their unorthodox belief system.

The irony in what sounds like a “yeah, right” knee-jerk reaction is that the school’s dress code exemption clearly states, “the principal or designees shall not attempt to determine whether the religious beliefs are valid, but only whether they are central to religious doctrine and sincerely held.”

So it appears that the real issue here is: What is religion, and who gets to define it in relation to education? How widely held must a set of beliefs be to enjoy protection under the Constitution? Must a congregation exist for a certain period of time before its doctrine can be considered legitimate? Or is the simple incorporation of the church as a non-profit entity with tax-exempt status from the IRS sufficient to turn a group of like-minded people into a religion?

Disclosure: As someone with tattoos and piercings — including a nose stud just like Iacono’s — I was drawn to the subject matter of this case. However, my body modifications in no way relate to or stem from my personal religious beliefs.