Do you feel that way if you go to a grocery store that sells alcohol, and the under-21 cashier has to call someone else over to ring up an alcohol purchase?
The distinction in my mind is clear–though it may show a tendency to respect Catholics more than Muslims. Which given my religious beliefs is not surprising. I attend a United Methodist Church and my beliefs probably run a little more Evangelical/Fundamentalist than many of my companions.
Bacon is food. Facillitating someone else’s eating that food shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s just food. Even if it is food which is against your religious beliefs.
The morning after pill is designed to facillitate the Evil Murder of an Innocent Baby. (To borrow/paraphrase a poster in QD talking about Catholic politicians I skimmed last night).
Refusing to allow someone to decline to facillitate the Evil Murder of an Innocent Baby means that one is requiring that person to be an accessory to murder.
The above description of the morning after pill is kind of dramatic. But I’m not sure that it’s far off from how some pharmacists see things. (The description of the bacon, however, is purely my point of view). As someone who mostly believes that life begins at conception and therefore abortion is wrong, I have a hard time with the idea that someone should be compelled to do something contrary to their moral beliefs. Life is a whole lot more important to me than Food is.
On the other hand, I recognize that, no matter what would be true in an ideal world, in the world we actually live in, abortion is not always the worst outcome of a pregnancy. And if abortion is not the worst possible outcome, then making the means to avoid pregnancy with few complications accessible to those who need it most is desirable. And, to my mind, that includes the morning after pill.
(kung fu lola has a part of it as well. Any idiot can run a cash register, and they exist at plenty of places where bacon is not logically sold. Pharmacists get much more extensive training, including (I believe) some on the ethics of when NOT filling a prescription is the right thing to do. (Mistake by doctor, suspicion of attempt to evade restrictions on controlled substances, new prescription will interact with old prescription . . . ). Therefore, I respect a pharmacist who says no more than I do a cashier who says no.
Most states allow 18 year olds to sell alcohol, at least in grocery stores and drug stores. Is Illinois different?
Yep, it sure does.
I look at it exactly the opposite way. Someone wants to deny me bacon? I can do fine without bacon. Someone wants to deny me birth control? I can’t do fine without birth control.
It helps that I don’t much like bacon, of course. My MIL seems to think she couldn’t survive without it.
If I’m buying alcohol, I head toward the older cashiers. But if I didn’t, it’s still kind of an expected delay for me. I would be flabbergasted if I were delayed in buying bacon. Still, a minor delay wouldn’t bother me. Having to scan it and bag it myself wouldn’t bother me.
Many sources differentiate between guide dogs and pet dogs, but all dogs are considered “unhygenic” and “unclean” and Muslims are required to wash any part of themselves that comes into contact with their saliva.
I really hope my Muslim neighbors who run the local store don’t start this sort of shennanigens. They sold me a pack of Danish bacon this morning, and last night they sold me four beers. If only they can sort their stock levels out I could buy cigarettes off them too…
I’m in Minnesota, I have to buy liquor in liquor stores. And I remember that you can serve alcohol in Minnesota at 18 (i.e. I’ve known plenty of underage waitresses) - should we start selling something other than 3.2 beer in grocery stores (which can be rung up by the 16 year old clerk), we probably wouldn’t pass a law about needing to be 21.
Oh. My. God.
I didn’t know that. One of my (two) roommates is Muslim, and second roommate and I got a dog this year. :smack: I thought she just didn’t like him.
Islam, in a very strict interpretation considers dogs to be ‘unclean’.
I still don’t really know what ‘unclean’ means to the Islam faith.
But I will say, that I did work with a Muslim fellow that expressed this idea when I dropped by work with my dog one day.
He was a little distraught that there was a dog in the room. Even for a few minutes.
This was about 18 years ago. What made it hard for me to understand is that this guy could be smelled from 5 feet away. I really didn’t understand. Later, he was let go because of his lack of hygiene. It was bad. REAL bad BO.
But my dog, a very healthy and clean Labrador was unclean.
As far as I know, you have to be 21 to ring an alcohol purchase in Illinois. '(I haven’t found a cite yet.) Personally I’m terrible at guessing people’s ages, but I don’t think there are many under-18 cashiers at my local supermarkets or Costco (which is where I tend to buy alcohol anyway), and they’ve had to call over someone to ring up the alcohol purchase on plenty of occasions. (Trader Joe’s doesn’t seem to have that issue, but then their cashiers don’t tend to be so young.)
But then, having grown up in the home of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, my perspective on alcohol may be a bit skewed. There were no alcohol package goods purchases allowed in my hometown until 1984, and it was totally dry until the 1970s.
But in any case, if you’re in a checkout lane with an underage cashier, and anyone in the line is buying alcohol, you’re going to be held up for a minute or two. It’s part of living in a society with restrictions on alcohol sales.
Frankly, I’m surprised the issue doesn’t arise with alcohol much more often than it does with pork; isn’t any given grocery store purchase more likely to contain the former than the latter?
I think we are rapidly reaching the tipping point where fundamentalist Moslems, become more annoying than fundamentalist Christians.
from here:
Also, it’s pretty easy to find out more about Islamic purity laws.
In Colorado, you can only buy 3.2 beer in a grocery store. It’s not a big seller except on sundays when all liquore stores are closed. A blue law.
This whole thing does make me wonder a bit. Even in my small tourist town we have a number of I beleive Muslims that work there. From Somalia mostly.
It seems that they can sell, bag and stock pork products and beer. Perhaps they have come to a middle ground in that if you move to another country, you may just need to understand and accept some of the differences in your new home.
I was going to offer an opinion, but I was distracted by
mmmm, free bacon.
I dunno. If they’re that adamant about not handling pork, we could use a bunch of them in Congress.
snort I wonder how devout Keith Ellison is about this. (Not as a jab, I’m actually just mildly curious. Not enough to do any work to find out, though.)
Sacrilicious!
I see this the same way as the pharmacist debate, actually. If a Muslim owns a store and doesn’t want to sell bacon, then it’s his or her perogative not to do so. If a Muslim is a cashier in a store that sells bacon, then he or she needs to work it out with their employer as to what they are going to have to do. If the employer insists that they need to ring up that sale as they would any other, then they have to do it. If, on the other hand, the cashier can work out some kind of deal with the employer to work around it, then that is fine, too. The employer is probably going to make the decision based on: 1) How good of an employee the person is otherwise, 2) How hard it is to find good employees, and 3) How much it irritates the customers.
What I would probably do if I was running a supermarket is have a sign at the checkouts indicating a “No Pork Products” aisle. Then the customer would have to decide if they wanted to use that aisle or not. My experience in buying liquor is that it doesn’t really delay the checkout if they have to get another checker over for that item, as they usually call someone, and continue checking out the rest of the order while waiting for the legal-age person to come over. No big deal.
And Delicious too!