Special Rights for the Religious
We have seen religious people such as Mike Huckabee demand special rights that others do not enjoy. For example:
- A Muslim flight attendant refused to serve alcohol. This is half of her job. This is like a stripper demanding to be paid even though she refuses to pole dance.
- Various government clerks, e.g. Kim Davis, Lillian Ladele and Gary McFarlane have refused to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples. It is not their job to rule on who is allowed to be married. They are trying to subvert the law. They are like a police officer who arrests people for chewing gum because he personally does not like gum.
- A baker refused to sell wedding cakes to gay couples. This is no different than a lunch counter refusing to serve blacks.
- For religious reasons a professor refused to wear an FM device so all his deaf student could access his lecture. What nonsense! How could a religion created thousands of years ago have anything at all to say about electronic devices?
- My computer company refused to serve the military or anyone in the military. Because my motive was not religious, my motive was not irrational enough to be protected.
- A Sikh refused to wear the standard Mountie uniform. He insisted on wearing a turban. This could be accommodated with little inconvenience, and the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) decided to let him do that. However, in general I think an employee does not have a right to modify a uniform in any way. If you don’t want to wear a McDonald’s uniform, work somewhere else.
If you give in to all these requests to override the law with religious belief where does this lead? If you have the religious freedom to get out of jail free for any law or get out of doing your full job, simply by claiming your personal religion demands it or that god that told you so, then you can break any law and avoid any work activity even washing your hands after using the toilet (because Jesus said not to). You will have chaos if you allow any religious reason to trump any law. All law becomes potentially invalid. Claiming that god’s law trumps man’s law makes no sense. Every religion, every church and every believer has its own view of what god wants.
The Kim Davis case is about protecting the right to discriminate against homosexuals, not religious freedom. How can you tell? Davis has been married four times. She in an adulterer. She believes in no tenets of Christianity except persecuting gays. Ask Mr. Huckabee about the religious rights of a clerk to refuse to issue gun licences and to refuse to marry couples when one or both has military service. He would demand that clerk resign immediately and comply with the law, religious freedom be damned.
The indulgences to religious superstition can cause varying degrees of inconvenience/harm to others:
- indulging a special diet.
- indulging special clothing.
- excusing you from some part of your work duties.
- wearing giant religious symbols to intimidate and proselytize.
- treating a customer rudely or refusing to serve them personally.
- blocking a customer from getting service.
- encouraging violence against others.
- violence against others, including murder.
In the 1960s in Canada, Christians believed they had a moral right to kill homosexuals. In 2015 people like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee are championing the right to discriminate against homosexuals. They claim Christians are a superior class of people, and hence their religious right to enjoy cruelty trumps the rights of homosexuals to avoid being discriminated against. This master race crap should have died with Hitler, but the Republican party keeps digging it up.
The Kim Davis Story
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)