This just boggles my mind. Every religion has its sins, whether it is birth control or pork. I don’t want this to turn into a pile on, but in the effort to understand your POV better, I have to ask about the idea that a person who has devoted more time in study of his profession should have more leeway on expressing his religious beliefs at work.
Would it matter to you if the clerk at the Target happened to be, say a former Muslim religious scholar, who studied Islamic law for a matter of years, and is working nights at the Target so he can earn the money to start up a new mosque in town or something? I ask because I’m just not following what training has to do with any of this at all.
I used to live by a gas station where the night shift guy was a Christian fundie. He refused to sell me Maxim magazine. The other people in line probably thought I was trying to buy Barely Legal.
but it makes me want to experiment to see where the boundaries are.
Okay, they don’t want to handle bacon, and I assume the same for ham and pork chops and such.
But what about a can of pork and beans? You know, the ones with that tiny chunk of pork fat included?
What about frozen pizzas? Do they check the ingredient list to be sure it doesn’t have sausage on it?
Do they triple check your package of hotdogs? Some are all beef, some are chicken or turkey, but a heck of a lot of them include at least some pork.
How about a nice box of lard?
Or tortillas – many of them have lard among the ingredients, so ditto for frozen buriots and such.
Also, I question the whole ‘work around’ of having the customer scan and drop the offensive substance into the bag. If the prohibition is on selling pig products, then to me the essence of ‘selling’ is accepting money for the goods.
Actually, we passed that point when 19 of them decided to become pilots.
Note that these folks are nutters, I’ve known several muslims who had no problems handling pork products. They’d even eat a meal containing pork, while carefully setting the pork portions aside so they didn’t consume them.
It’s like the whacko fundies in Iraq threatening to kill people for selling ice, since it wasn’t available in Mohammad’s time, and thus forbidden, while forgetting that the AK-47 they’re carrying didn’t exist then, either. (Matter of fact, gunpowder wasn’t even around at that point, so they can’t even claim that the weapon is just a descendant of something that was around in his time.)
And what about me? My religion abhors the handling of … um… Cheetos. Can we make a “No Cheetos” line for me to work at? And my friend Billy over there, he can’t handle tampons. Apparently, his religion thinks tampons are “unclean.” Well, shyea! I guess I can see their point. So, a “No Tampon” line, too.
I suppose you have ancient scripture that you believe to be Divine Revelation, and a tradition of theological scholarship to back up those prohibitions? :dubious:
It depends on how far the employer is willing to go! My assumption would be that if the manager accomodated the Muslim cashier, and then got a bunch of different requests from other employees, they would then decide it all wasn’t worth their trouble. What would probably happen then is that they would reverse the decision and end up not accomodating any of the requests, including the one from the Muslim.
That was kind of the point of my post…it’s not about saying “we should” have an aisle for this or that, but more that the supermarket has the right to run the store according to what will work best for them. If it works out to their advantage to have a “No-Pork” aisle, then they will have one. If it doesn’t, then they won’t. And I would consider it the same for the other scenarios you mention.
See my previous post. My point is that it depends solely, in my mind, on what the employee can work out with the employer. If you can convince the supermarket manager that you need a “No Cheetos” line, then more power to you.
My point being that I am neither supermarket cashier or manager, so it’s really not up to me to decide what is reasonable in this kind of circumstance. As a customer, I might be annoyed by having special aisles, and that may have an effect on the manager’s decision, but other than that, it’s really just a deal between the two of them.
It makes me want to fill a cart with groceries, load them on the conveyor belt, pass the bacon through first and if the clerk refuses to ring it up, walk away and leave him to restock it all.
Repeat as necessery until the store manager restocks his balls.
Not evil, just a way of pointing out potential hypocrisy. Problem is, it never works. It’s like that list of prohibitions from a selective reading of Leviticus that gets emailed around as a response to Christian fundies’ selective reading of the Old Testament. No wearing poly/cotton blends, no eating shellfish, no haircuts, and so on.
Enabling others to sin is generally counted as a sin by Christians (wide, sweeping generalization, but there you go.) Nonetheless, these two cases are relatively similar, and it seems like the solution of transferring the transaction to someone else is an entirely workable solution, especially for the Muslim cashiers. Why make a fuss when none is necessary?
There are pharmacies that won’t sell the morning-after pill. Why can’t a pharmacist who doesn’t want to dispense them work there? That sounds easier than trying to make a conflict at your own workplace.
Look, I know that just because something is ancient doesn’t automatically lend it credibility. I struggle with the concept of Divine Revelation myself. But it’s insulting and facile to just dismiss scripture and consign all people who believe in it to idiocy. It’s beneath an intelligent atheist to use such spurious logic.
