When public obligations conflict with personal religious belief, which should our society honor?
That’s not a question with an easy answer, and it comes up with some frequency. Consider, for instance, the case of the Muslim taxi drivers in Minneapolis earlier this year. Some of them refused to carry passengers who had dogs with them, because they believe that dogs are unclean under the tenets of Islam and they weren’t supposed to have anything to do with canines.
But under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a blind person with a guide dog is supposed to enjoy the same access to public facilities and services as anyone else.
Here I must confess that I know very little about the tenets of Islam, and that my ignorance is deliberate. The little magazine that Martha and I publish once had a subscriber in Saudi Arabia. To mail it to him, I had to fill out and sign an Arabian customs declaration each month. On it I stated that to the best of my knowledge, nothing therein was offensive to the tenets of Islam. In this regard, the more limited my knowledge, the better.
But in the taxi-driver case, there certainly appears to be a conflict between the “free exercise” of religion and the legal rights of people who need service animals.
Similar conflicts extend into other spheres as well. There are pharmacists who refuse to process certain prescriptions, such as birth-control and “morning after” pills, on moral or religious grounds. Some even refuse to make a referral to a pharmacist who will fill the prescription.
A few states have responded with “conscience laws” that allow pharmacists to refuse to fill certain legal prescriptions, while others have passed laws requiring pharmacists to fill all prescriptions. After all, it’s not the pharmacist’s job to determine what medication you need, but to provide the medication.
So who’s right here?
Let’s go back to the cab drivers. Suppose one cab driver refused to carry interracial couples because he had graduated from Bob Jones University in 1997, back when that institution forbade dating by mixed couples.
Would we allow the cab driver to discriminate that way, no matter how fervent his belief that interracial dating leads to the “intermarriage of the races” which “breaks down the barriers God has established,” as a university spokesman put it in 1999?
I doubt it. Yet if we’re supposed to respect all religious beliefs, customs and tenets, then his excuse makes as much sense as a Muslim cab driver’s refusal to carry service dogs.
We expect attorneys to represent, to the best of their ability, people whom they or others might find morally repugnant. We expect doctors to treat sick and injured people, no matter what they think of them personally.
I doubt I ever agreed with a tenth of Bill Frist’s political views when he was Senate majority leader before the Democrats got control in the last election. But I admire him for his sense of duty. Aside from being a U.S. senator, Frist was also a physician. In 1998, a madman entered the Capitol and started shooting. The maniac killed two guards; one wounded him in the process. Frist rushed to the wounded shooter and kept him alive – not because Frist approved of wanton murder, but because that was his duty as a doctor.
So where do we draw the line between duty to conscience and duty to society?
The most sensible place is at the regulatory level. Both taxi drivers and pharmacists have licenses and permits granted by our governments to serve the public. If they find themselves incapable of serving the public with medication or transportation, then take away their licenses.
Discriminating against people on the basis of their religion is wrong, but that’s not what’s happening here. There are some jobs and some religions that just don’t mix. In other words, vegetarian Jainists shouldn’t look for work in a slaughterhouse. And if you’re not willing to serve the public, you shouldn’t be compounding pills or driving a taxi.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
