Image credit: dougww’s photostream.

So you walk into your local convenience store to buy a lottery ticket and a carton of cigarettes.  (It’s Friday, after all.) While he’s checking out your items, the cashier, Vijay, asks you with his thick Punjab accent what happened to your leg and motions towards your cane.  You tell him you were born with a birth defect that caused your leg to not develop properly.  Suddenly, a scowl comes across his face and he takes your cigarettes and scratch ticket back and yells at you to leave his store.  Vijay is a devout Sikh who believes your birth defect was a karmic result of your bad acts in a previous life. Therefore, he feels justified in refusing the business of a bad person.  He has banned you from his store because according to his faith, you must be a bad person; otherwise you would not have had your birth defect.

You decide to not let the loss of cigarettes ruin your weekend–after all, you can always bum one from your buddies while you’re out hunting.  Your next stop is a gun store to tell the clerk that your old hunting rifle seems to be misfiring, and because it’s so old you’d like to buy a new one.  The clerk, Moonbeam, informs you that she believes killing animals is sick and immoral, and she only sells weapons appropriate for human self-defense.  You ask to see another clerk, but are told she is the only one on duty and that you’ll have to return tomorrow morning to get another sales rep.

If these scenarios sound bizarre and senseless, they’re supposed to.  But the move to pass laws protecting the sales clerks in these circumstances are marching on.

Recently, the Bush administration announced plans to cut public funding to medical facilities who would discipline or not hire employees who refuse to perform or assist in medical procedures that their religious beliefs arguably forbid.  In essence, the Bush administration is punishing the gun store owner for firing Moonbeam.  This is not a precedent-setting action on the Administration’s part.  Many states have adopted similar laws over the past few years, largely due to an organized effort among health care professionals who claim a moral objection to dispensing hormonal birth control, both quick-acting and the regular variety. The justification? To allow the employees to practice their freedom of religion.

However, for all the discussion of the rights of the employees in these situations, the rights of the employers these laws apply to are completely overlooked.  If the owner of a pharmacy wants to require that all pharmacy employees agree to dispense all the available drugs they can legally dispense, that’s the right of the business owners.  If the administrators of a hospital want all their employees who might be called upon to abort a pregnancy to be willing to do so, that should be the hospital’s call and no one else’s.  If my boss asks me to represent a client I have a moral objection to helping, I have two options: represent the client or pack my bags.  Granting these sort of limited exceptions isn’t freedom of religion; it’s putting religion on a pedestal, making it superior to any other sort of moral belief system.

In a related vein, the same people pushing for these “religious freedom” laws are pushing the boundaries of decency by trying to claim that their religious freedom entitles them to behave like Vijay in our first scenario.

Earlier this year, a wedding photographer who was an evangelical christian refused to take a job photographing a lesbian commitment ceremony in New Mexico.  The lesbian couple filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Division, claiming that the photographer’s refusal to take the job was illegally discriminatory.  Much like Vijay, this photographer rejected a potential client based on a theologically questionable interpretation of Christianity’s rules on homosexuality.  While this story may sound peculiar, but I’ve heard enough stories of sexual minorities having trouble with small businesses and fundamentalist Christian friends of mine complaining about the state of employment law not allowing them to only consider heterosexual employees to conclude this is not an isolated point of view.

One needs to ask why someone who is religious gets a free pass on neutral laws whereas people prejudiced against other genders or races get slammed with these sorts of problems.  It’s especially mind-boggling when you consider nothing in Christianity requires or even suggests this sort of social isolation is appropriate.  Religious people are certainly entitled to their beliefs, and to freedom to practice their religion.  But since when is refusing to do business with a heathen a part of anyone’s faith?

The inherent contradiction in these views is astounding.  On one hand, these people want the freedom to impose social punishment on the unbelievers based solely on their own personal views.  At the same time, they want immunity from times the unbelievers they would punish seek to punish them!  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  If fundamentalist Christians want immunity from the social consequences of their actions, then they should be required to respect the views of those who do not believe what they do.  If they want the freedom to reject potential employees because of the employee’s moral views, then they should expect to be subject to the same rules.  It’s as old as the Golden Rule itself: Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You.