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About two months ago, BYU admitted in the New York Times that, although it had a medical and a theatrical exception to its no-beard policy, it didn’t allow for religious exemptions from the policy.

That struck many of us as outrageous (see this prior BCC post and the comments), especially in light of the LDS church’s sincere commitment to encouraging and protecing religious liberty. Well, the policy has changed.

As Utah’s KUTV reported tonight, BYU has officially changed its policy to incorporate three areas where an exemption to the beard policy may be granted: medical conditions, theatrical performances, and religious reasons.

Hurrah!

A handful of things to note: the religious exemption isn’t codified yet. I’ll be interested in the language: based on BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins’s statement, the religious exemption apparently won’t be automatic. Rather, it appears that it will be on a case-by-case basis. Hopefully, codifying the religious exemption means that the case-by-case review will be largely pro forma (that is, limited to determining whether a student is, in fact, a Sikh, rather than an inquiry into how observant the student is). Only time will tell how effective this change in policy is as a practical matter, but I have high hopes.

Also, this change just affects BYU-Provo. I don’t know whether BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii, or LDS Business College provide religious exemptions from their beard bans. If they don’t yet, I hope they follow BYU-Provo, for all the reasons laid out in my prior post.

Finally, this: “Jenkins insists this change is not in response to [the criticism BYU received].”

Look, this is a celebratory post, so I’m not going to argue. But really?