A nice thing about living in the USA is the freedom of religion.
You can believe (or not) in any God or Gods you'd like.
What you cannot do is expect me to abide by the rules your God demands you live by. Not my religion, not my guiding light.
You cannot also expect me to treat you in accordance with your rules unless they happen to coincide with the secular laws.
If your religion forbids you to do something that is otherwise legal; guess what? I am under zero obligation to abstain from that behavior. Bacon cheeseburger on a Friday? I'm good.
There are places where there are clashes about belief. The Moslem taxi drivers who refused to transport people who had alcohol with them is a decent example. There's nothing in the law that says they can refuse to transport someone with a bottle of scotch. What they are doing is attempting to apply their religious rules to someone outside of their religion. Bzzzzzzz! Wrong answer. Their job is to haul anyone who can pay the fare, with a couple of clearly defined and codified exceptions. If your religion forbids you to do your job, you should pick another job. Your religion forbidding you to do a job should also be allowable grounds to terminate you; for refusing to work. No work, no job.
If your religion requires you to take certain Holy days off, we can work around that, that's why we have vacation days. You should not get extra days just for the religious ones. I have the same problem with smokers getting an extra hour of breaks to smoke that the non-smokers didn't.
If your religion forbids you to look at naked women, don't look at them. Don't expect me to stop, I have no such Holy Writ on my titillation.
If your Holy Word demands that you kill me for looking at naked women, we have a problem. Remember what I said about in accord to secular law?
A faithful person gets stuck between some hard choices in the US. Above all else you must obey the secular law, or there cannot be anything close to religious freedom.
The US is full of restricted freedoms. The goal is to be as free as possible without that freedom infringing on the rights of others. The balance is difficult. Diversity™ is not helping to strike that balance.
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Hear, hear! One reason a lot of us non-believers have...issues...with religion and the religious is because all too many of the believers think they have some sort of a mandate from On High to make everybody else follow their rules. If I'm not a member of your organization, don't push your rules on me, okay? If you have what you think are good reasons for me to do or not to do something, tell me so...use your words, as my mother would have said. Coercing me to obey rules that make no sense to me and do not apply to me does not please me.
ReplyDeleteActually, a Muslim taxi driver who doesn't want to transport you if you have booze is completely within his rights in the free market to NOT drive you around. And you're free to find a taxi driver who will. Granted, this presumes that there isn't some other force (gov't) at work here, like restricting the # of taxis at an airport or on the streets or whatever. The freedom of association also implies the freedom FROM association. If I don't like you for whatever reason (religion, skin color, bad breath) the government has no place to compel me to associate (do business) with you.
ReplyDeleteLemme rephrase the taxi issue. If _I_ hire you to drive MY taxi, you will haul anyone who pays the fare. If you refuse to haul because your religion says no booze, you will be fired. Your religion is saying that you cannot be a taxi driver.
ReplyDeleteThe government already compels too much in that example. The driver should have been compelled to follow the law about discrimination. The owner of the company was compelled to retain the drivers who are basically refusing to work.
Your freedom of association is tempered by your job responsibilities. Your personal preferences about many things are secondary to the demands of the company you FREELY AGREED to work for. You accept the position, you abide by the company policies while you are on the clock.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't like that, you are free to find another job.
The thing about the alcoholphobic taxi-drivers is that they don't even know the rules of their own religion. Islam doesn't forbid non-Muslims to drink. The only reason Saudi's officially dry is because they found out that, try though they would, they could not trust expats not to give booze to the locals...and the locals generally couldn't handle it (think teenagers on their first toot.) After a spectacular murder by a drunken Saudi, the then King basically said "No more!" And, to this day, quiet home-brewing and wine-making by expats for expat consumption's generally winked at, as long as it's not done in the open to frighten the camels and old ladies.
ReplyDelete