Oh, and you need your wedding certificate to whip out dramatically when your husband/wife is at the altar and the priest says “If anyone knows of a reason this marriage cannot take place…” you say “I OBJECT! THE GROOM/BRIDE IS ALREADY MARRIED!”
Duh.
You should have let people know that they cannot unsee that photo…
Heh, I doubt the right will be advocating for this Muslim flight attendant. However I view her situation a lot differently than Kim Davis. For one, Kim actually could avail herself of a reasonable accommodation for her religious beliefs–making sure that she keeps on staff at least one deputy who is willing to issue the licenses. Under Kentucky law Kim doesn’t have to, and it’s sort of a false scenario she’s created in which she has to be personally responsible for someone else issuing the licenses. For two, Kim is an elected official, and I don’t think those offices are entitled to many of the job protections that regular employees get. But Kim isn’t being denied a reasonable accommodation, she’s in fact refusing that, and going so far as to prevent the public from receiving the services of the County Clerk, entirely because of her personal religious beliefs.
No less than Justice Scalia himself (in a different case years ago), wrote that a government official whose conscience conflicted with their legal job duties would be honor bound to resign their position. He mentioned a hypothetical in which he himself was opposed to the death penalty, he said that if he were, he couldn’t remain on the bench because the Supreme Court is part of the “machinery of the death penalty” since all capital cases are routinely appealed to the Supreme Court, putting justices in position to vote to stay the execution or not. Since his legal opinion is that the death penalty is constitutional, his argument is he couldn’t vote against every execution before the bench out of conscience concerns as that would be supplanting his legal judgment with his personal beliefs.
But the EEOC does actually require reasonable accommodation of religious beliefs for regular employees like this flight attendant:
To my mind, the original compromise they gave the Muslim flight attendant–that she takes drink orders but then conveys them to other attendants to deliver them (so she isn’t serving the alcohol) seems pretty reasonable to me. This is a classic accommodation situation where in my mind you can balance the work duties around a multiple flight attendant flight pretty easily. Now, I can see if she was working flights with only one flight attendant how the airline could view serving alcohol as an intrinsic part of the job, that couldn’t be passed off onto someone else, and thus not able to be accommodated.
The good thing about her being in jail is that we don’t have to listen to her.
The bad thing about that is that it prevents her from Cliven Bundy-ing herself which I fully expect her to do. These small people like her and Bundy get some support and a little fame and think they need to share their unfiltered philosophy with their minions. It never turns out good for them, but it’s fun to watch.
More details on the African-American flight attendant (a fairly recent convert to Islam). From the story:
One xenophobic & possibly racist attendant had the “problem.”
Zipper Head Ted Cruz is taking his presidential campaign to a jailhouse on Tuesday as he plans to visit the Kentucky county clerk jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
So I’ll admit to often not being hip to all the lingo, but the only use of the word zipper head I’ve ever heard is as a racial slur against Asians. Cruz is Hispanic. Why are you calling him a zipper head? Or using a racial slur to describe him at all, for that matter.
12 years ago, CookingWithGas said he thought it was referencing someone who had a lobotomy, because of the scar. Sounds reasonable to me.
Bunning just ordered her released and ordered her not to interfere with the issuing of licenses.
Now that she’s getting out of jail, we await word as to whether Huckabee and Cruz will visit her at her trailer…
If it has bars on the windows, they can pretend it’s a jail.
Forgive me if I am totally wrong here but can’t an employee be expected to perform the basic duties of their job? To my thinking serving drinks and food to passengers is a pretty essential part of the job of a flight attendant. Can she refuse to serve ham sandwiches to people? I find this puzzling because there are surely others who work as flight attendants whose religious beliefs forbid consumption of alcohol. Are there no Baptist flight attendants? Mormon ones?
If there is some type of accommodation mandated by law fine but this situation seems like it would create problems in a variety of ways if every religious rule of behavior had to be accommodated in the workplace.
Read the article or read the excerpt I posted above. The problem was not with the company, but with a racist & xenophobic co-worker.
I find hard to believe she will not interfere. Hadn’t she already said that the licenses issued without her signature during her “absence” were not valid?
She doesn’t actually have any authority in regard to marriages in Rowan County, only the issuance of a license. Those licenses that have been issued, she has no power to “recall” or “rescind”, and she has no authority over validating the marriages performed under the authority of those licenses. FWIW I do think there’s a chance she’ll try to interfere with her deputies; but I think Bunning wanted to give her the chance to not be in jail. Because if she doesn’t relent then conceivably she’d have to be jailed until January when the legislature meets to (presumably or at least possibly) create a legal workaround.
The law says you have to make “reasonable accommodations.” FWIW, Baptists and Mormons to my knowledge are not prohibited from serving alcohol. Mormons are definitely prohibited from consuming it–a Mormon would have to chime in with more details. Baptists aren’t even generally prohibited from consumption of alcohol, albeit there is a strong overlap of “Protestant teetotalers” and “Baptists.” But half my family was Baptist growing up (other half Catholic), there is no unified Baptist doctrine against alcohol consumption, and certainly not against serving it. Some Baptists are just part of morality movements against alcohol that aren’t strictly related to their religious beliefs. There is a religious prohibition on “drunkenness” depending on how you interpret parts of the bible, but that’s not the same as a prohibition on alcohol.
So to get back to your question, serving alcohol is arguably a small part of the flight attendant’s job, and the accommodation they had worked out allowed her to do her duties otherwise. Often a reasonable accommodation will mean you take on more work in one area while not performing work in an area that is against your religious beliefs.
Not all jobs can make accommodations, but my opinion is the flight attendant could be reasonably accommodated. Examples of people who can’t be accommodated would be say, a taxi driver who is Muslim and refuses to transport a seeing eye dog. Taxi drivers are regulated transit people who cannot disregard the ADA, and there can be no accommodation for a driver who won’t pick up a service animal. Albeit many have fought on this issue up in Minneapolis (which has a large population of Muslim immigrant drivers.)
Kim’s lawyers have now vowed that she will violate the conditions of her release.
Honestly, at this point, going full-on FMotL and declaring that the courts cannot establish joinder between KIM DAVIS and “kim: of the family davis, created by the lord jesus” and therefore have no jurisdiction over here, might actually be a better legal tactic for her to attempt.
At least her supporters are calm, intelligent, rational, upstanding citizens.
*Dozens of anti-LGBT activists protested Monday outside the home of the federal judge who jailed Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The rally outside U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning’s home in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, was organized by the anti-abortion group Operation Save America, and protesters carried signs distributed by the conservative American View group founded by the neo-Confederate creationist Michael Peroutka.
“You, sir, are the one that’s in contempt of the law,” said the Rev. Philip “Flip” Benham, head of Operation Save America and father of would-be reality TV stars David and Jason Benham. “You, sir, are the one in contempt of God’s court, you’re in contempt of the Constitution of the United States of America, of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and sir, you need to repent.”
“If you don’t repent, we’re going to ask that the sheriff in Grayson County arrest you for putting this precious little girl into jail,” Benham added. “It’s wrong.”
Benham and his group have called on the Rowan County sheriff to arrest the federal judge when he arrives at work Thursday.
“Judge Bunning is in contempt of the Court of Almighty God and the constitutions of both Kentucky and the United States,” said Benham, who has been convicted of stalking an abortion provider, in a statement that included the name of the judge’s street.
Attorneys for Davis, the 49-year-old Rowan County clerk, filed an emergency motion in federal court asking Gov. Steve Beshear to exempt her from the requirement to issue marriage licenses.
Police and federal agents stood guard outside the federal judge’s suburban home as protesters drove up in a truck festooned with pro-theocracy slogans and carrying signs that warned “the wages of sin is death — remember 9/11.”*
“Precious little girl” Give me a break. Seriously?