Freedom from vs Freedom of Religion

               Is Sarah Imposing her religion on others if she wears this ensemble to public school?
 

Consider this article from the NYT:

A secondary school in northeastern France has sent a 15-year-old student home twice in the last two weeks for wearing a long skirt that the principal judged was “an ostentatious sign” of the girl’s Muslim faith....

A law adopted in 2004 forbids elementary and secondary school students to wear visible signs of their religious affiliation to school, including skullcaps for Jews, noticeable crosses for Christians and head scarves for Muslims. School officials, though, are increasingly construing the ban to apply to articles of clothing like long skirts and headbands, in ways that appear to vary from school to school.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Elsa Ray, a spokeswoman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France.

The principal at the Léo Lagrange school in Charleville-Mézières decided that the black maxiskirt the girl wore ran afoul of the rules and wrote to the girl’s parents that their daughter had been sent home to change into more appropriate attire.

 A photo of Sarah that appeared in Le Monde, the national daily, shows a warmly smiling girl in a black and white head scarf, a long black skirt that does not cover her shoes, a closefitting white shirt and a pale pink sweater over it. Without the head scarf, it would be hard to pinpoint her attire as typically Muslim, and even less so if the skirt were the gray model rather than the black.

This is an application of the French constitutional guarantee of a secular society, of freedom from religion, and thus when a schoolgirl wears religious attire to a public school she is somehow imposing her religion on others in violation of their right to freedom of religion.

Notice that in America, if government tried to forbid religious attire from being worn in public schools, it would violate the right of the religious student under the Free Exercise Clause. This is freedom of religion as opposed to freedom from religion.

Just a small difference in the prepositions (from vs of), but a huge difference in terms of how a society deals with religious pluralism.

Which society's views of religion in the public square do you prefer? Why?

Update: NYT editorial