Sources : http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,114756,00.html?
If the link no longer works, google the name "Ali Culed".
Citing religious reasons, some US Muslim cabbies refuse to ferry passengers carrying alcohol. Ironically though, a drunken passenger would not be rejected, if he was not carrying alcohol drinks.
The ban has created chaos at the Minneapolis-St Paul international airport, where about three-quarters of the 900 taxi drivers are Somali, and mostly Muslim.
Airport officials have begun working with taxi drivers to install colour-coded lights on taxi roofs to indicate which are alcohol-friendly and which are not.
I don't know exactly what the law in the US is that gives cabbies the legal right to reject passengers carrying legal items, but I thought that is crazy.
To me, a cabbie operates his business through getting a license - and this license did not allow him to discriminate legal passengers carrying legal items. A taxi is not his personal home, it is the equivalent of a business premise.
I am surprised that the authorities did not revoke their licenses.
Have these cabbies considered that what they did is to legitimise other people discriminating against them, or refusing to serve them if they were carrying the Quran, simply based on the individual's religious beliefs?
A year ago in the US there was another perhaps similar case. Some pharmacists refused to fulfill prescriptions for Morning-after pills (abortion bills) citing their religious beliefs which prevented them doing so.
ReplyDeleteTo me this is a slippery road, if people start allowing their personal religious beliefs to interfere with their professional lives or against the laws of the state, then there is no telling what else they might do. There are strong clashes of ideologies in the world today and I do not like what I see.
To me, if you want to bring in religious beliefs into your work, then you should make sure your work is really *your* own.
ReplyDeleteMake a small correction, its pharmacists not pharmacies. It was not the companies but the individuals themselves. Sorry for the misunderstanding. But yes I agree with you.
ReplyDelete