The British government bureaucrats say that people don’t have a right to wear a cross or crucifix at work, and two workers have taken them to court. However, it doesn’t seem that anyone is mentioning the real issue here. You have a right to free expression of your religion, of course, but not on someone else’s property or at a place of employment which is privately owned by someone else. The owner of the company has a private property right to establish whatever rules that apply to employees, and if the employees or prospective employees don’t like the rules, they should be free to go work somewhere else.
That case is totally different when a place of employment is publicly owned, however. In that case, it gets more complicated, in which, if an entity is publicly owned, everone has a right to express oneself in whatever way they wish. And that is another good reason why property, businesses and so forth should not be publicly owned.
A completely different situation is when the government establishes rules for everyone in society, other than just basic laws that should be absolute: No physical aggression except in self-defense, no theft or fraud, no trespassing. But if the government were to pass a law that said, “You can’t wear a cross” or, in the case of the fascist French government, an Islamic headscarf, that is definitely a violation of the individual’s right to practice or express one’s religious beliefs in public.
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