There is an interesting controversy in England over a policy of U.K. retailer Marks and Spencer, which has allowed Muslim employees to refuse to help customers buying dishes with pork or alcohol. The result was long lines of shoppers who were told to wait for a non-Muslim employee to check them out. With huge numbers of people buying champagne for the holiday, customers are irate as they stood around for another cashier without religious objections to appear. There is now a Facebook page to boycott the store over the policy. However, the Obama Administration is supporting a similar claim in a U.S. case.
On Monday, the company apologized for the incident. However, the company did not say it would change its policy but rather said “[r]equests are considered on a case by case basis and may lead to an individual working in a department where conflicts wouldn’t arise, such as in clothing or bakery in foods.” In the meantime, Muslim groups have supported the policy and encouraged more stores to adopt it. Salman Farsi, media officer of the East London Mosque Trust “[w]e respect Marks & Spencer as a retailer that allows its employees to observe their religious values.” Farsi said.
We have faced the same conflicts in the United States, including a few that have gone to court. One repeated conflict is the demand by Muslim taxi drivers that they have a right to refuse to carry passengers carrying alcohol like wine from a store or dogs (which some Muslim view as “unclean” animals).
There is a recent case brought by the Obama Administration that could result in greater attention to this issue. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued a trucking company, Star Transport, Inc., in Morton, Ill., for not accommodating the refusal of Muslim truck drivers to deliver any product containing alcohol. EEOC District Director John P. Rowe announced that “Our investigation revealed that Star could have readily avoided assigning these employees to alcohol delivery without any undue hardship, but chose to force the issue despite the employees’ Islamic religion.” John Hendrickson, the EEOC Regional Attorney for the Chicago District Office added “Everyone has a right to observe his or her religious beliefs, and employers don’t get to pick and choose which religions and which religious practices they will accommodate. If an employer can reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious practice without an undue hardship, then it must do so.”
While I am highly supportive of free exercise rights, I fail to see why this is not a bona fide occupational qualification for employees. If you are a cashier or a taxi driver, those positions require the interaction of people of different cultures and values. It depends how you define hardship. It seems to be that trying to track and accommodate the various religious views and preferences of employees is a hardship. It would also require companies to inquire as to the religion of drivers to be sure that it has enough non-Muslim drivers to make deliveries. That itself could be viewed as discrimination. Moreover, the company may have short notice of deliveries or the content of shipping. Moreover, drivers may want to confirm the contents of shipments, causing delay. It seems reasonable to expect people with such religious views to find employment that will not cause such conflicts.
What do you think?
This be would be like me an atheist demanding the right not to sell Christian books as a cashier in a Christian bookstore.
Reblogged this on .
blind melon pete,
Just the perfect thing for a guy goin’ downtown to see his gal. 😀
Offer to pay for the bottle of wine, which you found in the store on your own, in Rupies.
http://youtu.be/4Z-uO5TPQfM
hope my local mosque is handicap accessible for my seeing eye pig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z-uO5TPQfM
“Give me your poor, tired, VICTIMS yearning to be paid victims.” We now have “the land of the victims and the home of victimhood.” As my wise old man would say, “Buck up, buttercup.”
“Congress shall make no law…”
Who are we fooling, besides ourselves, when we even entertain the notion that we are a self Governed Nation that has a viable Constitution our elected Officials support and defend, anyway?
M&S does a thriving business in areas other than alcohol or pork. Getting a job there would not necessarily or even normally be an issue for most Muslims. Businesses have accommodated religion in many ways for many years. For example, what kind of an uproar was there when folks were expected to work on Christmas day or even Thanksgiving? HEY, those people work retail and business that sell things should be able to sell them when they can, right? Starbucks was founded by a Jewish person (I hear) and yet most Starbucks are closed on Christmas day. The one that could find open was overwhelmed with business the entire day, so obviously,if they wanted to force all their employees to work on that day, they could do some great business, right? Who are CHRISTIANS to dictate business practice? And yet, one way or the other, for 2 thousand years now, Christians have done so. As well as controlling the medical industry and the legal system.
It’s about 2000 years to late to get on your high horse about Muslims not wanting to sell pork or alcohol. Blue laws still exist in the US.
I can’t believe that such ugly things as I see in the remarks made earlier are allowed on this blog. I guess free speech reigns supreme. For some, anyway.
What do I think? I think: who owns the store, the shareholders or the employees? If I went through the time to shop at a business only to have one of the employees tell me they could not sell me a widget because they personally objected to selling it I would ask “Do you want my business or not? If they still refused to sell me the widget I would leave everything at the checkstand and walk away; never returning.
The effect of this is going to hurt any company’s bottom line obviously but in the end it will hurt muslims as well. They will become toxic in the eyes of employers, especially ones who work with alcohol or whatever. And many are aware of that there are subjective and subtle ways to reject a job applicant such as he lacked interpersonal skills or other candidates did better on the presentation skills of their resume.
I think there is more going on with this English story than might be realized. Many English view what is going on as being taken over by muslim culture and values and the idea of one of the largest retailers, and culturally British, flagship industries is now abandoning the English and satisfying sharia law. That is driving much of the backlash, rightly or wrongly.
What next, a baptismal episonde prior to checking out?
“You wanna buy something here, get baptized over there.”
(“I can only sell to devout members of the ‘Just Like Me’ religion”) …
The world around us is beginning to get more and more scary.
Years ago I refused to get into a taxi at an airport in Victoria BC. The inside smelled so bad of body odor that I simply could not pass the open door. The driver was a Sikh. I have nothing for Sikhs and nothing against Sikhs. They receive tolerance in Canada, are allowed to carry daggers on public busses and even the RCMP and military allow them to wear turbans instead of the regulation head gear. However, I was refused service by the other taxi drivers because the cab with the odor was first in line. My only choice was to call a friend at midnight.
There comes a moment when religious rights go too far, regardless of the religion. We have become overly sensitive to those whom we once persecuted and now allow them rights beyond the norm and intrusions into our common goal of mutual understanding and tolerance. If a muslim does not want to be around alcohol or pork then that muslim should seek work elsewhere. Simple and straightforward, anything short of that interpretation of free choice is not free for all.
Tolerance is a two way street with extremists throwing rocks when you drive on a Saturday and attacking you if you say the wrong thing about characters in the stories that have now become holier than everything else for everyone. When will people realize that these are nothing more than elaborate bedtime stories like those penned by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, lessons to live by. Religious fanatics leave us alone.
I agree that Sikhs are given way too much privileges in the name of religious tolerance. After 9/11, as an airline captain, I had my leatherman, and nail clippers taken away from me and had to do a strip search while in full uniform, with about three different badges hanging off me. So when I saw two Sikhs waiting to board my flight, I told the gate agent that I wanted a secondary search of them since I knew that they carried knives as part of their religion.
The gate agent went ballistic, and called down the supervisor who handed me a sheet stating that Sikhs were allowed to carry their knives on board, and that unlike me, who had to take my hat off, they could keep their turbans on. I asked if I could have the paper, and she said NO. I asked if I could have a copy of it, again NO. I asked is it top secret, and I got a YES finally. So since I know why the Sikhs carry the knives, which is to kill Muslims, I had no real problem with them on board.
After I got back to my home base at RIC, I went to the security guys I knew there and they gave me their copy which said the same thing. In fact, most of the memo was lifted verbatim from the Sikh wen site! It is pretty stupid to let one class be privileged, and to treat airline pilots as scum. That was my main complaint.
Jude,
Just tell them to call Houdini
Bruce – actually, they do consider food to be “magical”. A shopping mall with a small indoor area near me has a Jewish cafe. They have a sitting area in the indoor section of the mall, and they have signs posted that no other food is allowed in the area at all. I once had to walk through part of it carrying Chinese food from the not-Kosher place in the back of the mall (because kids that were with their parents at the cafe were running amok through the aisles and standing in my way). I was screamed at by two patrons and an employee about how I just ruined their cafe and they had to do a bunch of things to make it “magical” again.
I take it the SmilingAtheist is now or will soon be banned from this website, Professor?
Years ago before I got my education I was driving a semi for Schneider National Carriers. Yeah, using weapons was against my religious convictions, but I had an obligation to my kid to keep my job so I hauled arms for the feds for whom Schneider had some contract from some plant down south without comment, even though I conscience was pricked. I doubt very much that the EEOC would have backed me had I refused to haul them, and I needed my job to pay my mortgage soooo….. These days I’m an attorney and I conclude that I would not have had any job protection had I refused to haul weapons due to religious convictions. What will happen next? Will a devout muslim woman get a job as a dancer in a nightclub and then refuse to, er, perform and will then demand accommodation? Slippery slope, methinks.
The religious pronouncements declaring certain foods, people, etc as verboten refer to the CONSUMPTION of said food; not, per se, the handling thereof. (Especially if the food is prepackaged or handled in such a way that physical contact is never made.) So, the store is making an accomdation that isn’t required, and inconveniences others. The food, despite religion, isn’t magical and can’t desecrate someone simply by contact with a container. So, the store is well meaning but wrong.
At will employees can be fired for any reason, including refusing an order from management, such as the order to sell the products the business offers. This is so fundamental to free commerce, any chipping away at it will breed a growing entitlement that will invariably lead to government enforcing religious law.
If one’s sensibilities are so delicate one cannot follow simple orders, one ought to get out of the public service industry. The industry should not be made an overseer of religious edicts.
So I can refuse to transport fäggots in my cab… for my Islam tenets, that is far worse than alcohol, and would desecrate my vehicle.
Islam also empowers believers to kill those who practice unnatural sexual relations, so by this ruling, not only can I deny service, but I can deny life.