The cabbies no longer had a problem once the imams spoke, so your reference to their own religious understandings is nonsensical in this case. Just for the record, Doug, I actually know the doctrine, so I get that one can have a view different from one's religious leaders. I also read all of the cases saying that there is an absolute right to believe.
I think there is real force to Steve's suggestion about common carrier rules and standards. No one defending the cabbies, particularly Doug, has adequately explained away the need for them. And I am not persuaded that this is not like the race cases. The point of the industry is to transport people, and the imposition of selection not related to travel is problematic. No one, including cabbies owns "their industry." That is a rhetorical sleight of hand that attempts to build in some kind of right to choose any industry you want. The Court has assigned such interests the most deferential level of rationality review, so that is a true non-starter. Where is the concept of personal responsibility, personal choice, and accepting the consequences of one's beliefs? The world, particularly the transportation industry, should not have to be conformed to the views of any one religious set of actors. The Amish are not going after high-tech jobs and then arguing that they don't believe in high tech, are they? You tipped your hand when you referred to those whose religious world view permits alcohol consumption as "looser" and those who object as having more "scrupulous morals." Your analysis appears to be more about your preferred public policy vision than the law. Marci A. Hamilton Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Yeshiva University 55 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 (212) 790-0215 hamilto...@aol.com -----Original Message----- From: Douglas Laycock <dlayc...@virginia.edu> To: 'Law & Religion issues for Law Academics' <religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu> Sent: Wed, Mar 7, 2012 8:13 am Subject: RE: Requirement that cabbies transport alcohol = "tiny burden"? The exemption with lights to alert passengers would not have changed the culture. It would not have significantly affected anyone’s right to drink alcohol, or to transport alcohol. It would have allowed the scrupulous Muslim cabbies to live their own religious values. Hostility to religious liberty for a group that is doing no one any harm very often reflects hostility to the group. Sometimes it reflects hostility to all religion or to all exemptions for religious liberty, which is not much better. But when there is a vast outpouring on a particular claim, disproportionate to the usual debate over religious exemptions, it is more sensible to infer the first explanation, hostility to the group. Perhaps some imams said the cabbies were misreading the Koran. Good for the imams. But not relevant to the cabbies’ understanding of their own religious obligations, unless the imams persuade the cabbies. The solution that Greg and Eugene describe was ingenious, and the reaction that Greg describes is appalling. The problem we have in so many of these various culture-war issues is that each side wants to write its own values into law, and insist that the other side conform in any interaction that is the least bit public. It is not enough that I can transport alcohol; Muslim cabbies must help me transport it or lose their jobs and be barred from their industry. We cannot restore social peace until we remember that in a regime of individual liberty, the goal is to let both sides live their own values. Douglas Laycock Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law University of Virginia Law School 580 Massie Road Charlottesville, VA 22903 434-243-8546 From: religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu [mailto:religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Marci Hamilton Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2012 5:59 PM To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics Cc: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics Subject: Re: Requirement that cabbies transport alcohol = "tiny burden"? Why is anger at a publicly licensed cab picking and choosing passengers according to religious belief anything like anti-Muslim animus? Cabbies can't reject passengers on race. Why should they be able to reject those with religious beliefs different from their own? If they don't want to be in the company of nonbelievers, they should find another line of work. Also-- a number of imams announced the cabbies were misreading the Koran. There was no requirement they not transport others' cases of wine. No one was asking them to drink the wine We have crossed the line from legitimate claims to accommodation into the territory where religious believers demand a "right" to exist in a culture that mirrors their views. That is called Balkanization Marci On Mar 6, 2012, at 4:48 PM, "Sisk, Gregory C." <gcs...@stthomas.edu> wrote: As Eugene suggestions, the accommodation by use of lights for Muslim cabbies who objected to transporting visible liquor had every prospect of success. Even airport officials agreed that it was an ingenious solution. It would have been seamless and invisible, as the dispatcher would flag over a taxi without the light for those transporting liquor, so that the passenger would not be inconvenienced or even realize what had happened. And this accommodation was abandoned, not because of any concrete showing that it caused any problems for passenger, but by the confession the airport commission’s spokesman, because of a “public backlash” of emails and telephone calls. The spokesman said that “the feedback we got, not only locally but really from around the country and around the world, was almost entirely negative. People saw that as condoning discrimination against people who had alcohol.” And not only did the airport commission then revoke the accommodation, it began to treat the Muslim cabbies even more harshly. Where previously the punishment for refusing a fare was to be sent to the end of the line (which was a financial hardship because the wait might be for additional hours), now the commission would suspend or revoke the cab license. It is impossible, in my view, to understand the chain of circumstances as anything other than antipathy toward Muslims – and the tenor of the “public backlash” makes that even more obvious. The Somali cab driver episode is described in the introduction to an empirical study that Michael Heise and I have currently submitted to law reviews, finding that, holding all other variables constant, Muslims seeking religious accommodation in the federal courts are only about half as successful as non-Muslims. A draft of the piece is on SSRN at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1917057 Greg Gregory Sisk Laghi Distinguished Chair in Law University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota) MSL 400, 1000 LaSalle Avenue Minneapolis, MN 55403-2005 651-962-4923 gcs...@stthomas.edu http://personal.stthomas.edu/GCSISK/sisk.html Publications: http://ssrn.com/author=44545 _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.