Don’t accommodate religious intolerance

Piety is a place in the heart. And soul — for those believe in what can’t be disproven.

Apart from places of religious gathering, amongst the like-minded, it doesn’t otherwise belong in the public dimension, the secular spaces we all share in Western culture.

That includes up in the air — aboard an ExpressJet passenger plane. Or inside the clerk’s office in Rowan County, Ky.

Kim Davis, the county clerk who infamously refused to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples, following the dictates of her conscience, was cut loose on Tuesday by a judge. She’d been incarcerated for contempt of court.

Sticking her fingers in her ears, ignoring court orders and state legislation, Davis had fashioned herself — or at least others did on her behalf — a conscientious objector, like a Quaker who refuses to fight under conscription, except of course there is no conscription anymore in the U.S. So analogies are hard to come by, unless perhaps drawing up anti-abortionist medical practitioners who won’t participate in the procedure at publicly funded hospitals and clinics.

Readers might recall, years back, the Toronto cop who defied orders to protect the Morgentaler abortion clinic at a time of volatile demonstrations, citing religious beliefs. Babies were being killed in there, he argued. There were no babies on board, just fetuses at various stages of gestation. But zealots use their own dramatic language. It invests them with a higher moral purpose.

Americans take their constitutional right to oppose government very seriously. Hence the right to bear arms, intended in its infancy as the freedom to raise a militia against overbearing and autocratic government. It was never about the right to own your own automatic assault weapon in case the mood should strike to murder dozens of schoolchildren.

Davis had elected to selectively disobey the laws she has sworn to uphold, at least the one, specifically, with which she disagrees. In practice, there is no opt-out clause, and as a bureaucratic functionary, Davis has always been aware of this. She can object inside her narrow little mind all she likes. But she can’t unilaterally defy statutes or a court order.

Yet Davis had become a symbol, because nobody really wanted her behind bars. I suspect she’s the only person — aside from hard-right evangelical fellow-travellers — who enjoyed the spectacle of her cloaked in self-righteous martyrdom. Others do fret that accommodation, a peaceful coexistence, could not be reached.

Why, for the love of God, should anybody accommodate intolerance and mean-spiritedness?

Maybe there are just some jobs we aren’t all suited for — or entitled to. Like, I can’t be a major-league baseball player or the Pope. Except of course it’s all about entitlement these days. Charee Stanley is the flight attendant for Atlanta-based ExpressJet who’s been suspended for refusing to serve alcohol to passengers requesting a libation. Stanley converted to Islam in the three years since she was hired. Obviously her religion, any religion, is of no employment significance. An observant Old Order Mennonite would probably not aspire to a flight attendant’s job, because the sect cleaves to non-modern ways.

The duties of a flight attendant — apart from safety instruction, dealing with emergencies, that sort of thing — are fairly limited. Hauling that drinks cart up the aisle is one of them. But an attendant who won’t even handle alcohol — as Stanley has refused, on the grounds that her faith prohibits it, which is a new twist to me — shouldn’t be donning the “uniform.” Accommodation should always be the objective, and Stanley claims such an arrangement had been working effectively with colleagues. But at least one of those co-workers wasn’t having it anymore and filed a complaint on Aug. 2 with their supervisor, alleging Stanley wasn’t fulfilling her duties.

Stanley has now brought a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying she wants to do her job without serving alcohol.

Hey, I would like to do my job without the intolerable affliction of halfhour deadlines. But deadlines are a tenet of the newspaper religion.

I’m not merely being flippant. But religion-based grievances in the workplace — or, say, on the sex-education curriculum adopted for Ontario schools — are increasingly flipping the individual against the collective, the personal against the public.

Equal employment and human rights commissions are actually the wrong place for addressing these matters, because, especially the latter, as they exist to enforce distinctions, they promote inflammatory otherness, rather than effect compromise.

Recall the Toronto restaurant owners who last year were ordered to pay three Muslim men $100,000 compensation after the human rights tribunal heard their case. The men — the head chief, sous chef, and a cook — argued they’d been forced to leave the establishment following alleged incidents that included badgering them to taste food during the fasting hours of Ramadan. They were also, the men contended, pressured to try pork, which was against their religion.

Clearly, Muslims can’t be bullied into eating during Ramadan or allowing pork to cross their lips — nor pork for observant Jews, or beef for strict Hindus, or meat for vegetarians. But maybe if you adhere to such dietary restrictions, you shouldn’t be working at a restaurant that prepares and serves those dishes. A chef who doesn’t taste his or her own food? I’d call that sacrilegious. But the tribunal found otherwise.

I’m not advocating the purely contrarian, like that mischievous young woman who whinged that a Bay Street Muslim barber refused to cut her hair, on the grounds he wasn’t permitted to touch an unrelated female. The customer had a plethora of alternative hair-snippers nearby.

But turning the world upside-down, or a plane? Or compelling everyone to abide by your zealous religious views on same-sex marriage?

That’s holier-than-thou bilge and god-damned.