Are Jewish waiters allowed by their employers to refuse to serve bacon, sausage, pork, ham, and all forms of pig meat in British restaurants?
Do Catholics serve only fish on Fridays?
Are pharmacies and pharmacists in Britain refusing to provide contraceptives for reasons of religious conscience?
Employers refusing coverage for contraceptives in their health plans?
(Whoops, I forgot National Health.)
Or are only Muslims allowed to refuse to enable others to, according to them, disobey God?
Surely that's a step too close to the outright theocracy of refusing to allow others to disobey?
Not really the same, anyway, as hospitals or medical professionals demanding the right to refuse to personally do what, according to them, God forbids.
And even that much indulgence of religious silliness is more than what's included in free exercise.
That only encompasses doing what God, the gods, or anyway religion, according to you, requires or urges.
You exercise your freedom by doing something.
True enough, so absolute a guarantee, like the First Amendment's equally absolute guarantee of free speech and a free press, is idiotic unless the regulatory power it denies to one authority is held by another.
Say, for example, the several states.
But in any case no Christian society has allowed polygamy, nor is any with a strong feminist movement likely to do so.
Nor does any modern society that I know of allow even animal, let alone human, sacrifice.
And spontaneous decisions of inconvenienced shoppers to take their trade elsewhere do not a boycott make.
Steve should know better.
And in fact I'm sure he does.
A serious question, as BooMan would say.
Do the same people both oppose the right of Catholic hospitals to refuse to do abortions and support the right of vegetarian restaurants to not serve meat?
Just asking.
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