We don't need freedom of religion
ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com
At one time the uniform for a police officer in Toronto (and I'm sure everywhere else in Canada) included a cap that was quite inconsistent with the Sikh practice for men to wear a dastaar.
The law prohibiting discrimination against persons by reason of their religion is defined to include directly passing over someone because of their beliefs. But it is also held to include indirectly passing them over by way of rules and regulations that are inconsistent with their beliefs and practices unless there are strong reasons to enforce them.
The rules about uniforms were in a grey area. There are good reasons for police officers to wear a consistent uniform. But would a Sikh in a dastaar really violate those good reasons? The police changed its rules and regulations to include the dastaar as an option, with its colour and the inclusion of a badge on the head just as the original cap holds a badge.
Kirpans are a very contentious subject and reasonable people can and do disagree on how they should be handled. But dastaars are an example of places where a failure to provide legal protection for people to practice their religion could create an indirect discrimination that is inconsistent with Canadian values.
The author points out that if there's no good reason for a rule, it should be abolished for everyone. One interesting point of discussion is this: If there is no specific rule protecting the freedom to practice one's religion, how would rules such as the uniform rule for the police ever evolve?
Is religion a choice?
I ask because some religions forbid conversions "out", a few with rather serious penalties. Since most adherents of those religions are entered into them by their parents (that is, without their consent) ....
People born into certain religions with certain kinds of parents and communities often don't have a psychological choice because of the nature of their environment. Just because some INTPs slip through the cracks does not mean that your typical ESFJ has a choice.
> Just because some INTPs slip through the cracks does not mean that your typical ESFJ has a choice.
Yes it does, they just didn't assert it.
I think the answer depends on who you are. It is a choice if you don't believe in religion. Its not a choice if you are religious.
Children can and do break with their parents religion as they grow up (and do so /often/), so clearly it's a choice. Sometimes it's a hard choice. But it's still a choice that's frequently made.
But if you've got amputated legs, you can't choose to just hop up out of your wheelchair and go for a run like pretty much anyone else can.
Perhaps I can make it a bit more black and white. A few suburbs away from me there was a Turkish man who killed his daughter for 'dishonouring' his family (had premarital sex). Now, I am in Australia, and this kind of thing is seen by us as murder, but it's seen by folks where this man came from as honourable.
Should we be saying "It's just cultural, he didn't have a choice" or should we be saying "we're striving to create an egalitarian society, where everyone is treated as equals"?
This man had a choice and to argue that "it's just cultural" (of which "it's just religious" is a subset) deprives others of their freedom to be. Laws need to cover people equally or as said elsewhere you simply create another form of discrimination. This doesn't mean that laws don't need to change, but instead that they should be worded to allow everyone the same flexibility, not having to pass some sort of highly subjecting 'faithness' test.
For the record, the Turkish government has started handing out harsh punishment in an attempt to knock out "honour" killings.
Since honor killings happen in countries such as the UK....
Even if you're going to argue "it's a choice because it's not civil-legal to kill apostates", it's certainly "civil-legal" to shun them.
Tons of people reject the religion of their parents and are estranged from them for life, while still having a great - and in many cases markedly improved - quality of life.
And tons don't, and other tons do, but have a miserable life as a result.
They'll be glad to know that you belittle their situation.
You can study more and educate yourself and find your opinions changing as you learn, and maybe there are beliefs that you hold which you only hold because you've never spent the time to analyse them. But the number of people who analyse their own beliefs is small, as is the number of people whose beliefs will change when they are proven incorrect or when the evidence supporting those beliefs (if there is any) is cast into doubt. I think a person's religion is up to external factors and gut feeling - i.e. the subconscious.
If I wanted to become a Sikh or a Christian or a Muslim, I couldn't, any more than a Christian could voluntarily literally cease to believe in Jesus. And that's if I saw a benefit in converting at all, which is unlikely. Sikhs aren't Sikhs because they choose to be, nor Christians Christians, nor atheists atheists.
Does that mean you're okay with any discrimination against atheists by forcing them to engage in some religious practice?
Or is atheism not a choice?
Quit if you don't like it.
Well, one of the freedoms of religion in the USA is that we don't have a religious test for office. We get rid of freedom of religion and... that's not "discrimination" right?
I think another example might be more clear. Back in the 1990s, there was a big hullaballoo about Native Americans out West using peyote, a hallucinogenic, as part of a religious ceremony. Using peyote, however, was illegal in the state of Oregon, so a few members of the Native American Church were fired from their jobs and denied unemployment benefits after they were found using peyote. The Native Americans argued that they should be exempt from this law due to their religious beliefs, and many agreed. I don't, and neither did the Supreme Court (check out Employment Division v. Smith [1990]). And here's the reason: if peyote is "not that bad," i.e., if it's fine for /some/ people to use it (here, the Native Americans), then it should be fine for /all/ people to use it. If peyote is actually /too dangerous/, if it really /must/ be outlawed, then it should be outlawed for /everyone./ What someone believes about peyote should have no bearing on his right to use it. (This is the same reason we wouldn't allow ritualized murder of children even if someone claimed it was central to his religion--it's simply too dangerous!) It's /discrimination based on religion/ (or lack thereof) to say that Tom, who believes that peyote helps him communicate with a higher power, should be able to use peyote, but that Bob, who simply feels that using peyote helps him relax and to paint, should not. Why should Tom's belief be worth more than Bob's simply because a higher power is involved? And what kind of law should involve litigating someone's religious beliefs? Imagine: Q: "Isn't it true that you don't REALLY believe that peyote helps you commune with God?" A: "No, I swear I believe! I pray every day!" Q: "But I have a witness who says he saw you at Catholic mass last week! And here's a Bible we found in your house!" What a horrible mess that would be!
To get back to the dastaar example, then, all the author is saying is this: If a Sikh should be able to wear a dastaar, then an atheist should be able to wear a dastaar on the job, too. In fact, an atheist should be able to wear any hat of the proper color with a badge on it. His beliefs or lack thereof should have no bearing on his right to do something that everyone else can do.
You have an enormously optimistic view of police chiefs. Or perhaps police chiefs where you live are reasonable, inclusive people who are always looking for ways to broaden their force's recruiting.
Whereas up here in Toronto, the opposite was true. The police force remained staunchly Euro-centric until forced by rule to reconsider rules like the requirement that officers wear the prescribed hat. Left to their own devices, police chiefs saw no reason to change their rules about headgear or the minimum height required to be a police officer.
The changes didn't come because Sikhs petitioned the chiefs of police, the changes came because Sikhs petitioned the courts. And that is why we have constitutional democracies: Some portions of our rules and regulations cannot be left up to the "free market" or an executive branch that is concerned with obtaining a plurality of votes in the next election.
Actually I would guess the author supports religious discrimination, although he doesn't make a clear statement either away. If the discriminator is a private citizen, then a freedom to discriminate follows directly from the basic freedoms he lists, particularly freedom of association.
He evaded this issue by only giving examples of public discrimination (by public schools, courts, and government employers).
However, I'd only buy that as the writer's real message if he wasn't going for a subtext of Gee, look at all the unreasonable privileges people get on the grounds of religion!
I'm reminded of the argument that we shouldn't support gay marriage, but instead should support getting government entirely out of marriage and letting any consenting adults form any arrangement they want. I absolutely agree with that ideal, but it's not happening anytime soon - so I support gay marriage. However, there are people who make this argument and use it as a reason to oppose gay marriage as a "privilege" we should not be establishing.
I can't help noticing that people giving that objection are uniformly straight.
That says something about your powers of observation.
I note that most people giving that objection are unmarried, and a large fraction are "uncoupled".
As I implied with my first sentence, some folks making that argument are not straight, so they don't "remain straight".
Yes, most folks making that argument are straight, but since most folks are straight....
> Do you have a point?
My point is that your gaydar is broken at least wrt this issue.
You're welcome to point it out, but I sure don't see any such argument made by Graff in this interview.
You cited your personal experience, so you don't get to complain when I do exactly the same thing.
At this point, I simply don't believe that you've met gay people who argued against supporting gay marriage on the basis that we have to get government out of the business of marriage first. It's a highly dubious claim, and you seem less than entirely honest.
Not at all. I believe that you have described things as you saw them. I'm suggesting that reality was different.
> At this point, I simply don't believe that you've met gay people who argued against supporting gay marriage on the basis that we have to get government out of the business of marriage first.
Good for you. I don't believe your claim either.
> It's a highly dubious claim,
Based on what? Your perception of the political uniformity of gays?
> and you seem less than entirely honest.
Based on what?
I'm not relying on gaydar. I'm relying on "I'm gay and I think ..." statements. How do you know that they were lying?
What's the basis for your "uniformly straight" claim? Did they all say "I'm straight and I think ...."?
Look at the examples he chooses. He's not really arguing that anyone should be able to wear veils, not have pictures on their IDs, carry sheathed knives, etc. He's arguing that if voters wouldn't see any random person as needing/deserving to be able to do something, then nobody should be able to do it based on religion.
Myself, I'd say sure, let kids carry knives, whether pocketknives (as people in my neck of the woods happily let kids in prior generations) or kirpans. On the other hand, the writer's dog-whistling, saying that we should only do something as crazy as let Sikh kids carry kirpans if we'd be willing to have a stabby bloodbath in our (well, Canadian) schools.
While I'd love to be able to skip legal protection of enumerated rights, knowing that the government would respect my freedoms in every conceivable formulation, it ain't gonna happen. The best-case situation in Western society is that the government remains leery of obviously stepping on the rights that people most object to having abridged - free speech, religion, etc.
ETA: And yes, that means that some people will have a "privilege" - ie, they'll be exempted from some stupid law that would harm or impair them even more than it does everyone else. In that case, the answer isn't to attack the privilege, it's to attack the thing the privilege protects against.
- Mormon polygamy
- Christian sects that disapprove of medicine
- Ritual circumcision (especially when the mohel sucks off the debris from the penis with his mouth)
I would also add to that list the ritual slaughter of animals. Kosher and Halal both mandate that an animal cannot be stunned with a captive-bolt stunner before having their throats cut, and must be fully conscious. Needless to say, this cruelty only persists because of "freedom of religion".
If you ever want to get away with things you otherwise couldn't get away with, freedom of religion is probably the most potent argument you could unleash.
Mormon polygamy: the government shouldn't be telling you who you can or can't marry.
Christian sects that disapprove of medicine: the government shouldn't be forcing you to make changes to your body.
Ritual circumcision (especially when the mohel sucks off the debris from the penis with his mouth): sounds gross to me, but the government shouldn't tell you what changes you can't make to your body, or how you provide care for a member of your tribe.
Can government intervention in these areas bring about greater human well-being? Possibly, but I think the above are relatively self-regulating. Christian sects that disapprove of medicine (Christian Scientists for example) must contend with proliferating evidence of the benefits of scientific medicine. As long as scientists have freedom of speech too I suspect their membership will continue to decline in the US.
Can government intervention in these areas bring about greater suffering? Absolutely. The US government currently intervenes in gay marriages, and recently intervened in abortions (and many in Congress would love to intervene here again!).
I think parents still have a legal obligation to not be negligent. There's a difference between not providing any care (while playing WOW all day) and doing your Christian Scientist damnedest for your children. A person espouses civil libertarianism not because they hate government, but because they trust people and hold others to the personal commitments they make.
A civil libertarian would reject the notion that a government should restrict you from a personal activity (which parenting certainly is) - because of society's majority judgment against it. They'd easily call this tyranny of the majority - whether you agree with it or not.
However, a "classic liberal" would come at this from a natural law or humanist perspective and say there is a moral reason to do / not to do such things.
There is a distinction between civil libertarians and classic liberal civil liberties.
Back to the point though - you could get married to 10 spouses in front of God and your friends and never tell the government about it, and I doubt they would care (unless your cohabitation violated some health code or something).
Talk to a social worker and see whether or not you still believe that a government should still be able to step in and tell you how to treat a member of your "tribe"
I remember reading one social worker's long diatribe about why they burned out and quit. Out of several truly horrible things (black and blue children are ten a penny), the one that really stuck in my mind was the description of finding genital warts on the anus of a 7-year-old because his mother repeatedly whored him out.
"Self regulating"? Bollocks.
However, the prevalence of abuse and neglect in the foster care system - complete with cases on that order of horror - makes a very weak case for the idea that external regulation accomplishes any better.
If you had a drug that could save 50% of terminally ill patients, would you say "we have a very weak case that this drug saves lives"?
In order for your statement to make sense, the failure rate of foster care would have to approach 100%. Again, talk to an actual social worker about how they see foster care and whether or not they choose to use it. It's an opinion that will most likely come with caveats, but foster care is also a service they use frequently.
Untrue. Children end up in the foster care system for a variety of reasons, including simple loss of parents or a woman (or teenage girl) knowing she can't care for a child.
"significantly lower proportion of those kids neglected or abused"
The evidence is not as clear on this as you'd like it to be.
To correct your example, if we had a drug that caused strokes or death in a significant percentage of cases, simply saying, "Well, many of the patients we'd give it to would otherwise suffer strokes or death," would be a quick route to an FDA rejection.
As for halal, I'm not as familiar, but due to the level of ignorance you've shown on kosher, I'm going to have to call shenanigans and say "citation needed".
Do Jewish slaughter laws call for the animal to be conscious when having its throat cut, and do you think this is preferable to being stunned?
That is, if you HAD to kill your pet dog by cutting its throat, would you want it to be stunned or not?
I probably used Kosher and Halal incorrectly, but suffice it to say that slaughter of conscious animals is widely practiced in the Jewish and Muslim faiths. To ask another question: Do you think western slaughterhouses adopted captive-bolt stunning because they were bored, or because it granted a small reprieve at the end of the farming cycle?
Ah, so this isn't a matter of ignorance, but deliberate portrayal with a yes-or-no gotcha question.
But no, the requirement for an animal to be conscious is not universally agreed upon in kosher law. Further, the intent of kosher slaughter practices is to induce rapid loss of consciousness through blood-loss, minimal pain via the use of a razor-sharp blade, and a resulting humane death.
You can certainly cherry-pick kosher meat facilities that have failed to live up to this standard, but I can simply point to the normal state of meat-slaughter in the developed world, particularly the US.
No, it isn't. You tried to go on about ritual slaughter of animals, then backpedaled as your ignorance was pointed out. Now you're trying to reduce the issue of cruelty to animals in a slaughterhouse to a question of consciousness at the moment of slaughter, ignoring the fact that kosher laws require better treatment of animals than the civil laws governing slaughterhouses. The "we stun them, so they don't suffer" line is a favorite of the meat industry, even if it doesn't always work out that way.
But then, cruelty to animals isn't your concern. After all, it would be most humane not to slaughter the animal at all - but conspicuously, you're not arguing for vegetarianism.
A captive bolt does not always work on the first try, and it doesn't always fully stun either.
You can't just increase the power of the bolt or you get brain matter mixed into the meat, raising the risk of mad cow disease. So you have to carefully tune it to "enough to stun, not enough to kill". It doesn't always work.
With Kosher slaughter on the other hand making sure the animal dies very fast is important otherwise the meat is not kosher and can't be sold.
Consider this: When you use a stunner properly, the animal feels a split second of pain before becoming unconscious. At this point, pretty much every vet would say it can't feel pain.
But if you cut its throat while conscious, it can feel the pain of the wound immediately, and continues to feel it until the brain starts shutting down. This can take minutes. Cutting the throat does not cause immediate unconsciousness, and this is the problem.
Compare a properly stunned animal vs. an animal whose throat has been cut by via sechita, and tell me which one reaches unconsciousness faster. Because that is the animal that endures less pain in death.
It takes a few minutes for it to die, but it's totally unconscious for that time.
And I prefer to look at actual usage, not perfect usage.
For example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2008.07.016 for this type of animal 53% of the time the stunning did not work properly.
And according to http://www.viva.org.uk/campaigns/slaughter/std4.htm 5-10% of captive bolt stunning does not work properly. There are plenty of other sources that say the same thing.
If you had to kill your pet dog by cutting its throat, would you rather beat it unconscious first?
Anything can be black and white if you leave out enough details. And, you can even decide which side is which with your choice of details.
If it's successful, yes. They often aren't; it's not hard to find undercover video of "stunned" animals in clear, loud pain.
Let's take this whole what-if to the extreme:
If I had to be turned into a cow and slaughtered and was given the choice of a random secular slaughterhouse that would use a stunner and a random kosher slaughterhouse, I'd absolutely choose the kosher option. I'd have a better chance of not being injured and mistreated on the way to my death, and I'd have a better chance for a clean, quick, and minimally painful death.
Various countries currently have exemptions to their humane slaughter rules explicitly for Jewish and Muslim traditional practices. Here are some citations:
http://www.rspca.org.uk/ImageLocator/LocateAsset?asset=docum...
http://www.thepoultrysite.com/poultrynews/21457/controversy-...
Do justify that, especially in the context of the widespread abuse of animals under those humane-treatment laws.
I run a company selling primarily vegan products (http://screamsorbet.com), but also hunt and fish. I eat less meat than most Americans, but also have two whole wild boar hams currently in brine for Christmas dinner. I care about the conditions of animals, but eat meat with gusto when I do.
I agree wholeheartedly with the parent article that there should a consistent set of laws, and that exemptions based on belief are a loophole that should be closed. Either shechika is humane or it is not; but the religious beliefs of performant should not be a factor.
Then you're being uselessly pedantic, and failing at it - there's no slaughter involved in making quite a lot of kosher food.
"exemptions based on belief are a loophole that should be closed"
Then expand the freedoms of all people to make exemptions on peaceful religious activity superfluous. Otherwise, when dealing with governments that carefully parse and rank claims of rights (particularly when it comes to "weird" minority groups), exemptions can serve to protect particular freedoms for the people who most care for them.
Now, before you think it, nobody is saying that such restrictions on freedom are the proper long term solution to stopping kids stabbing each other, and better solutions should be put in place, but in the meantime, lives are literally at stake. Of course, it's also easily demonstrable that Sikh children don't really ever kill each other with their ceremonial daggers.
So frankly, I don't see a good argument as to why the law should never use race as a metric to optimize safety for minors while not infringing on the ceremonial customs of certain groups.
Freedom of religion is the right to believe whatever you want and not be discriminated because of it. There needs to be a freedom of religion because there is such a strong tendency to discriminate against minority religions.
Similarly the law needs to be the same for men and women, but the tendency to discriminate is so strong that there needs to be a law against discrimination based on gender.
Schools have to indoctrinate children. They're freaking _children_. It's normal childish behavior to lie when they're afraid of getting in trouble, hit other children or destroy their property when they get angry, disrupt lessons when they're bored, and ridicule others when they sense weakness. Discipline and indoctrination about proper behavior can't stop when parents drop their children off at school. If you don't want your kid indoctrinated by someone else, if you can't handle the idea of your kid being partly raised by people who may have different ideas from you, then school just isn't going to work. Forget about school, and forget about tee ball, summer camp, piano lessons, hell, forget about church, because you don't know the exact behavioral standards the Sunday school teachers might enforce. Just keep your child at home and you never have to worry about anyone indoctrinating your kid except you.
Considering that those of us in the US had to have a Supreme Court case to protect us from being forced to take part in group prayers in school, the far more likely case is that without a protected freedom of religion, the majority merrily pushes around various minorities on a religious basis.
Look at how poorly Muslims poll and how they're demonized by many in the US - and then recall that polls say Americans regard atheists even more negatively.
(And no, Canada is no utopia devoid of religious bullying.)
The goal of government, however, is not to take a stance on moral debates. It's to create laws that are amenable to both situations.
I believe with this professor is trying to say is that the constitution, or written law, should not include laws that are categorically protective of civil liberties that may not be culturally acceptable. We need to break down civil liberties in this particular arena into more granular cases and judge based on those cases as opposed to an overarching blank check for religion.
If you intend to make religion public via pony tails, emblems, beards, burkah, turbans etc, you're advertising your religion viz http://goo.gl/dHSA8 Govt will regulate every advertisement.