Listen you fuckers, you boozehounds...
Tim Cavanaugh | October 10, 2006, 3:59pm
Daniel Pipes needs a stiff drink after the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) of Minneapolis-St. Paul comes up with what appears at first to be a reasonable compromise between airport customers taking cabs home and Muslim drivers who refuse to take passengers carrying bottles of booze:
With this in mind, MAC proposed a pragmatic solution: drivers unwilling to carry alcohol could get a special color light on their car roofs, signaling their views on alcohol to taxi starters and customers alike. From the airport's point of view, this scheme offers a sensible and efficient mechanism to resolve a minor irritant, leaving no passenger insulted and no driver losing business. "Airport authorities are not in the business of interpreting sacred texts or dictating anyone's religious choices," Hogan points out. "Our goal is simply to ensure travelers at [the airport] are well served." Awaiting approval only from the airport's taxi advisory committee, the two-light proposal will likely be in operation by the end of 2006.
But on a societal level, the proposed solution has massive and worrisome implications. Namely, the two-light plan intrudes the Shari'a, or Islamic law, with state sanction, into a mundane commercial transaction in Minnesota. A government authority thus sanctions a signal as to who does or does not follow Islamic law.
What of taxi drivers beyond those at MSP? Other Muslims in Minneapolis-St. Paul and across the country could well demand the same privilege. Bus conductors might follow suit. The whole transport system could be divided between those Islamically observant and those not so.
Why stop with alcohol? Muslim taxi drivers in several countries already balk at allowing seeing-eye dogs in their cars. Future demands could include not transporting women with exposed arms or hair, homosexuals, and unmarried couples. For that matter, they could ban men wearing kippas, as well as Hindus, atheists, bartenders, croupiers, astrologers, bankers, and quarterbacks.
The tempting answer is Yes, pious fools should be allowed to turn down all those fares, and presumably go home emptyhanded at the end of their shifts. (Ironically, refusing to take drinkers in your cab also deprives you of the teetotaller's only pleasure: doing a slow burn of superiority and disdain at the drunken slobs whose lives are in your hands.) But all solutions become impossible once a regulatory agency is involved. The airport commission sets standards for correct and non-discriminatory service, which makes the reasonable response outlined above technically impossible. The only way the MAC has found this compromise solution is by carving out a fake exception to its own mandate. As Pipes indicates, once you've carved out one of those, new and more absurd exceptions can be expected to follow.
Just how and how much alcohol is forbidden in Islam is always a source of controversy, but Hadiths like the following don't seem to leave much ground for negotiation:
Allah's Messenger cursed ten people in connection with wine: the wine-presser, the one who has it pressed, the one who drinks it, the one who conveys it, the one to whom it is conveyed, the one who serves it, the one who sells it, the one who benefits from the price paid for it, the one who buys it, and the one for whom it is bought.
Taking that as your yardstick (and there are other possible yardsticks), it appears the anti-booze drivers weren't showing an exaggerated piety but following the rules they're supposed to be following.
joe | October 10, 2006, 5:54pm | #
Pipes writes, "Namely, the two-light plan intrudes the Shari'a, or Islamic law, with state sanction, into a mundane commercial transaction in Minnesota. A government authority thus sanctions a signal as to who does or does not follow Islamic law."
Only if non-Muslims were forbidden from operating these "dry cabs." If Mormons, AA-members, and Southern Baptists are also allowed to put on the little green light, then this is neither a surrender to the terrorist-religion (as Pipes considers Islam), nor even that more plausible and worrisome phenomenon, a violation of the establishment clause.
Avoiding undue entanglement with religion is a fine thing, but that isn't where Pipes is coming from. He doesn't want the government to do something that isn't undue entanglement, just because the people who want it are motivated by their beliefs as Muslims.
The question "Should the govenrment allow cabbies to operate dry cabs," like the questions "Should the govenrment ban anal sex," and "Should the government fund soup kitchens for the poor" should not be answered by considering whether or not we like the Islamic, Baptist, or Catholic religions. It is Pipes' determination to base his policy decisions on whether the proponents are Muslim that improperly drags religion into the law.
Drew W., "Should we try that lite-brite option for fundamentalist Christian pharmacists who won't fill prescriptions for birth control pills?"
In this case, the same service is available in the same location for a customer who is turned away by the Muslim cabbie. Literally, the operator of the cab stand simply points you to a different car. With phramacists, that is not the case. You'd have to go to a different establishment, usually some distance away. In some cases, this decreases access could deny a customer the opportunity to avail herself of the medicine she needs in time.
tarran | October 10, 2006, 9:14pm | #
Joe,
Two points:
1) I think you are splitting hairs (in a ridiculous manner) to claim that there is a difference between discriminating between skin color, sexual orientation, and carrying alcohol. The diffrentiation between alcohol and sexual orientation is especially weak because homosexuality is not detectable unless the person communicates their sexual orientation by modes of dress, actions or statements. In other words, there's not much difference in being offended by the presence of asealed bottle of alcohol in your cab and the presence of a gay man who is detectably gay. (Disclaimer I personally think discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is idiotic, and have never practiced it) (Addendum to the disclaimer: That's not quite correct. I did practice it once. When I was looking for mates, being a heterosexual male, I used to discriminate against men and lesbians)
2) Unlike your claim otherwise, this is precisely the same issue brought up when a pharmacy refuses to dispense birth control pills ot an unmarried woman who was not raped.
Here are how the situations are simmilar. The state has restricted the pool of people who can provide a service. A person cannot drive people for pay without a hackney licence, a person cannot sell certain medicines without a pharmacists licence. Generally rather than allowing anyone who applies (after demonstrating a certain degree of competency) the state sets an upper limit to the number of people it will permit to practice the trade in order to keep competition low and prices high.
Then, when some of these people exercise this power in a way that government officials do not like, it attempts to compel them to act in ways that are immoral.
The fact is, regardless of how he got into his profession, any cabbie has a right to decide not to take on a paying customer, just as any pharmacist has the right to decide not to sell something, or I have a right to refuse to write a computer program whose usage I do not approve of.
The neither the cab-driver, the pharmacist nor the computer programmer is a slave to be compelled to provide services against their will.
Now, if the state were to pass a law making it illegal to transport alcohol in a cab, or to provide birth-control pills wihtout a prescription, that would be immoral (oh wait they already do that sort of thing). But for the owner of a vehicle or a store to decide not to do business with someone, even for the most idiotic or pig-ignorant reasons is not only immoral, but not worthy of legistlative action.
The notion of special lights is not neccesarily a bad thing. It is, in fact, a communication between a seller and prospective buyers concerning services being offered. To me it is no different than a "No Shoes, No shirt, No Service" placard, or a sign stating, "We only serve customers who speak english", or a sign stating "Country and Western music nightly".
The owners of the airport (let's set aside that the state is operating a port for the minute) should be free to contract with whomever they want to provide taxi service to and from their business. The taxi drivers should be free to choose with who they do business with. And the customers should be free to take their custom elsewhere. The problem here is that the government is acting to limit the freedom of all the above parties.
tarran | October 11, 2006, 12:16am | #
I'm sorry joe, you're right. I should have addressed your point more explicitly.
I agree that it is much more difficult to find another pharmacy than another cab. But this is absolutely irrelevant.
Just as a farmer does not owe you food, a doctor owe you medical care, a prostitute owe you sex, or a cab driver owe you a ride, no pharmacist owes you medicine.
In other words, if all the pharmacists in the world were to simultenosly, and of their own free will decide to stop selling medcines, your rights are not being violated.
This is, of course, not to be confused with the situation where a pharmacist has some medicine to sell to you, and a busy-body passes a law preventing him from doing that.
A pharmacist refusing to sell me a birth control pill is not hurting me. Granted, if I'm in the market for a morning after pill and somebody who had some refuses to sell it to me on such spurious grounds as my marital status I'd have some choice words for him, but I have no right to force him to sell me something he does not want to sell me.
Now, I am not ingoring the physical lack of alternatives. But if the lack of alternatives bothers you, you are going about repairing the harm in exactly the wrong way. The lack of alternatives, the pharmacists or taxi-cab drivers actions are prompted by their knowledge that they can really piss of their customers a great deal before the customer walks.
Now, if one looks at the profession of cab-driver or pharmacist, one finds that there are people who want to enter the profession but are unable to enter because there are a limited number of slots open for people to take up the profession, far fewer than the number of qualified applicants who want to enter the field. This is, of course blatantly obvious in the case of taxi drivers, for example, I understand that a "medallion" which allows one to drive a taxi in New York City costs $50,000, which is probably 10X the cost of the car! In the case of pharmacists, this is accomplished through training programs that are needlessly expensive, time-consuming or limit a trainee's ability to support himself during the training process.
All of these expensive requirements are not inherently demanded by the profession, but are rather imposed by government officials in the name of reducing competition and protecting the revenue stream of exiting players by limiting the ability of new entrants to compete.
The notion that what is required are more rules to compel "proper" behavior from those who benefit from government protection is as illogical as the notion that the Iraqi insurgency can be defeated by shooting more bullets at them.
I suggest that it is time for the regulators to cut and run. They are dead-enders who would be much better off if they abandoned their destructive policies.
Again think of the poor, horribly maligned prostitute. Would you compel her to service clients that she didn't like? Then why should the cab driver or the pharmacist do the same?
(Incidentally the notion of public accomodation as a justification for state regulation is essentially a rationalization to justify the desire to push people around. It historically has been used to justify, among other things, laws against minority faiths, laws requiring segregation of races, laws requiring people to pay tribute to local robber-barons and the like. It's not the significant principle you've been told it is. Rather, the criteria are pretty arbitrary and elastic. )
