Secularism and dress

Eamonn at El Nuevo Pantano responds to the argument I made over removal of the ban, in Turkey, on wearing headscarves in universities. He says:

Secularism, by my lights, is the belief that religion ought to be excluded from the public sphere and especially such parts of it as education to which all citizens must have access and which are essential to the preservation of democracy. A secularist has no problem in supporting the right of citizens to believe what they like by way of religion but thinks that no special claims can be made for those beliefs to be accommodated in the making of policy or the management of public institutions.

... Precisely where the line should be drawn on any particular issue where this tension [between freedom of belief rights and secularism] is present, such as the headscarf one, is open to reasonable dispute. I don't see, therefore, that anything obliges me as a secularist to oppose the ban on the wearing of headscarves in universities.

I think Eamonn's point here rather trades on the idea that to let people wear what they like requires an 'accommodation' - as if there were some kind of 'state of nature' position on dress that was undermined by certain modes of it unless special arrangements, involving public costs, were made. But this isn't the case. People just go about wearing this and that, and to let them do so requires no accommodation and entails no extra expenditure. It's not the same as if there were to be a demand for universities themselves to make a display of religious affiliation by putting up symbols of faith in lecture halls; or to cover the cost of providing places of worship on university premises. No accommodation is necessary in permitting someone to wear what she wants; and there is no 'tension' between permitting this and maintaining the secularism of the public sphere. Moreover, public institutions extend beyond universities: if you can ban religious clothing or insignia from these, then why not also from libraries, hospitals, parks, highways, streets, pavements? Can you imagine an edict forbidding, in all public spaces, not only Muslim headscarves, but also the shawls or wigs worn by orthodox Jewish women to cover their hair, and the yarmulke, and the crucifix, and nuns' habits - imagine this without there being an outcry against it as a piece of rank illiberalism? I can't. Secular societies seem to have managed well without such prohibitions. Long may they continue to do so.