Oregon’s prohibition on allowing teachers to exercise their faith by covering their heads or wearing other religious garb dates to a shameful anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant period in state history and is overdue to be changed, House Speaker Dave Hunt, D-Gladstone, said. Hunt plans to introduce a bill to repeal the 1923 law and says he is optimistic it will pass, given the broad spectrum of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who support the change.

Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian and state schools Superintendent Susan Castillo sent every lawmaker a letter last week urging them to end the ban on religious dress for teachers. The 86-year-old law has not been tested in court since the Eugene school district won a 1986 Oregon Supreme Court case that upheld its firing of a Sikh teacher for wearing a turban, or dastaar, as her faith requires.

Few Oregonians were aware the state had such a ban — one of only three in the nation — until the Legislature passed a law earlier this year allowing all workers except teachers to wear religious dress at work in most instances. The 1923 law on teacher dress was passed when Kaspar K. Kubli, an open supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, presided as speaker of the Oregon House. It was included in the Alien Property Act of 1923, which prohibited Japanese Americans from owning property in Oregon, and was designed to prevent nuns and priests from wearing their habits or vestments in classrooms.

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