Let's say one of your best furniture salesmen shows up at work one morning with an enormous, new tattoo of a blue figure with four arms covering most of the side of his neck. As an employer, you're more than a little dismayed that this image might be off-putting to the families that come in wanting to put a new dinette on lay-away. So you move the employee to the warehouse and let him know that if he wants to keep his job, he better get really good at operating the fork lift, because he's never going to see the sales floor again, not with that tattoo.
Oops. You must not have read the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's new guidelines on "Religious Garb and Grooming in the Workplace: Rights and Responsibilities" and the accompanying "Fact Sheet."
That tattoo happens to be Vishnu, preserver of the universe and, as a new convert to Hinduism, it's the employee's right to religious expression of a "sincerely held belief" that does not cause the employer's business "undue hardship."
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