But on those flights the airline would be unable to make a reasonable accommodation for the flight attendant and therefore wouldn’t have to accommodate him/her. That’s not the situation in the current case, where not only was there a reasonable accommodation available, but it was in place with no problems until a Muslim-hating co-worker filed a complaint that also babbled on about the employee’s “foreign writings” and “headdress”. ExpressJet should have simply ignored the complaint.
I’m surprised that Massachusetts lets customers scan their own alcohol. Can’t do that here. I mean, isn’t “selling” the alcohol supposed to include carding people and such?
In my city you have to have a local license to sell, so new cashiers who don’t have one yet will have to call someone else over to ring up any alcohol.
I’ve experienced this. What’s stranger is that the muslim clerks would scan bottles of alcohol, but wouldn’t scan sealed, shrink-wrapped packs of bacon.
My work group did a cooking class as a corporate team-building outing. Some drops of balsamic vinegar splashed on the apron of a muslim co-worker, and he freaked out <> This same dude made a big fuss another time when our team had lunch at Chili’s. His Coke was poured into a mug, and he made a loud, sanctimonious scene w the waiter because mugs are associated w beer.
High maintenance people are a royal pain…
I am interested to see how long Ms. Davis remains in jail, or if they remove her from office which will be a pain. My big issue with her, other than the obvious, is that she is the worst poster child for this cause. Please do not pick which parts of the bible you obey. She has been married 3-4 times, and she had a set of twins that were a product of an affair. I cant stand hypocrites!!
In the case of firefighters…
There was one in DC who converted to Islam and chose to grow out his beard for religious reasons. Firefighters aren’t allowed to have full beards because they don’t fit safely under their masks, so he was reassigned to a desk job. He sued, claiming religious discrimination, and he won! I couldn’t believe it. Public safety should trump all. In a perfect world, the mask would fit over Grizzly Adams’ beard but if it doesn’t, I don’t want a firefighter who doesn’t have all the safety equipment on to try (and fail) to rescue me or a loved one.
This is my sentiment as well, but it’s not the law. The law says that if the person can be accommodated without much bother-- and apparently, on that airline, the Muslim attendant could be accommodated without much bother, because other flight attendants were willing to serve alcohol-- then she must be accommodated.
I believe NYS’s liquor laws are written so there are certain specific things under 21’s can do. I know one of them is tasting liquor in an academic program. I’ve never been asked to scan my own beer and some of the checkers look like they are under 21.
I live in MA and I have never scanned my own alcohol. However, the state has weird rules about which grocery stores can sell beer, and maybe the places I’ve bought it tend to have 18+ cashiers. I know people can bartend at 18, so I’d imagine if there is a segment that can’t sell, it would be 16-18.
I’m not sure that would work as an accommodation if the cashier is required to check ID, though. You can’t just be like “you scan your alcohol, I’ll look away and not be involved.”
In NJ, you can’t scan your own alcohol, when you buy booze they scan in your id (driver’s license) as proof they checked you. I suppose someone could swipe my id, then let me scan the booze, but in reality they could work a non booze line.
The other thing about the Kim Davis case is it involves a public office, and the rules there are different, for one thing in the public sector because it is government they are supposed to be neutral in terms of religious belief, so having a court clerk claiming the right to decide what the office can do is a gross violation of the first amendment, since she de facto would be establishing a religious belief above the work of the office. The reality is she does’t want accommodation, what she and other people are trying to do is block same sex marriage from happening, if she was truly bothered by her religious beliefs, she could have asked for accommodation rather than blocking the issuance of license, she could have had clerks do it, but she wanted to be the bully and force her beliefs on others, which is very much what the religious right want to do, this isn’t religious freedom, this is the freedom to discriminate based on their twisted version of faith.
@GMTplus7 what is the problem with vinegar and Islam? I know about the alcohol, pork and interest prohibitions but I wasn’t aware of anything relating to vinegar.
This is fascinating to read (and, below, to watch) and explains the legal situation extremely well.
@musicprnt - I read that the judge offered to let her out of jail if she promised to not interfere in the deputy clerk’s issuing of marriage licenses and she refused. No, she doesn’t want just an accommodation! her lawyer might call it that but she wants the law to change so she doesn’t have to issue the licenses.
^^Dan Savage. It should be possible to google the entirety. He also suggests she is doing it to get rich.
There is a common misconception that the sanctuary cities are violating laws, but this is not the case. Also, to my knowledge, none of them have defied federal court orders. Rather, they have declined to cooperate with federal law enforcement. It’s certainly controversial, but it’s not an example of defying the law.
I think the Volokh article is really good–it points out what makes these cases hard, which is that there has to be a somewhat subjective evaluation of how burdensome the accommodation would be. You’d have to know more facts to know (for example) how burdensome the accommodation of the Muslim flight attendant would be.
I think colleges already dealing with these issues. At Yale, for example, observant Jews get physical keys that let them into their residential colleges so they don’t have to use key cards. There is one residential college where that won’t work because of its configuration, so they aren’t assigned to live there. I think that’s a pretty reasonable accommodation.
I can’t decide how much Kim Davis’ incarceration is due to principle/grandstanding, and how much to the incompetence of her lawyers.
If she were actually interested in an accommodation rather than publicity, and if her lawyers were competent, they would have gone to some bureaucrat in the statehouse. They would have said, “Ms. Davis understands that same sex couples are entitled to get marriage licenses from the county clerk’s office, just like opposite sex couples. She doesn’t want to impede that. Unfortunately, her religious convictions preclude her issuing those licenses with her name on them. Under Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Ms. Davis is entitled to a modest accommodation. What if the state waives the requirement that her name be on the licenses, and one of the deputies issues marriage licenses?” The bureaucrat would have agreed to that, or would have come up with some other simple solution, and the problem would be solved.
The federal judge is just interested in making sure that same sex applicants get their licenses, as the Supreme Court says they’re entitled to do. If presented with an agreement between Davis and the state that allowed same sex applicants to walk into the he office and get their licenses, just like opposite sex applicants, he’d open Davis’ cell door.
Davis’ right to a mild accommodation for her beliefs (that doesn’t infringe upon the Constitutional rights of same sex couples) comes from the state of Kentucky. She shouldn’t be appealing to the feds for an accommodation. The feds don’t have to enforce state law.
What will this flight attendant do when a blind person boards with a seeing eye dog? (Remember the cabbies who didn’t want to transport dogs?). The cabbies were told this was discrimination in public accomodation and was against the law.
Get someone else to serve the blind customer a drink, if the blind person wants to buy a drink?
Sorry for being flippant, but I’m not understanding what the relevance of this post was. I thought that the issue was a Muslim flight attendant who had religious scruples about serving alcohol, and who worked flights with enough other flight attendants so someone else could always be the one who served the drinks, while she did other work such as serving food. The important part of this was that the job of serving drinks would still be accomplished, with only minor disturbance to other flight attendants and paying customers. That’s why the accommodation was granted. If instead the Muslim were a bartender who decided she didn’t want to serve alcohol, then no accommodation would be granted.
I don’t like the laws that mandate religious accommodations. I think we should get rid of those laws. But I realize that the accommodations are (theoretically) only granted in cases where the inconvenience for others is minor.
I don’t think the issue is the competence of her lawyers, but rather their motivation. I believe they are from an advocacy group. I doubt if she is paying them.