In another case of intolerable tolerance, Britain is straining under the pressure from Muslim council chiefs in Britain, who are commanding their loyal Muslim followers to refuse alcohol-based hand gels, which are essential to combat the spread of disease, including swine flu. According to those Muslims, the Koran bans its followers from consuming alcohol, and thus forbids the use of alcohol gels. Council chiefs replaced the gels with non-alcohol gels, which are less effective in killing germs.
Although not all Muslims agreed with the council, the decision has a deleterious effect on the medical industry, schools, and businesses, where the danger of spreading disease is the greatest.
This should be satire.
Sadly, it’s not.
(At least, I think it’s not. Source: Muslims refuse to use alcohol-based hand gels over religious beliefs, DailyMail.co.UK.)
I did a bit of searching, and found a more recent article, from the St Albans & Harpenden Review, which suggests that the original article might have been somewhat hyped:
Council leader Robert Donald told the Review: “We offered staff the option of using alcohol-free gel, not just for religious reasons but because some people are alergic to alcohol, and two took up our offer.
“The Mail on Sunday must have been desperate for a story.”
Abdul Hakim,who represents the multilingual mosque in Hatfield Road, St Albans, said individual Muslims had to make up their own minds on whether touch alcohol and follow their consciences.
He said: “I think it depends on an individual basis and the person. Everyone’s beliefs are different when it comes to faith.”
The question I think we (and the UK) need to be asking now is whether a policy based on safety should be subverted in favor of pandering to religious ritual and custom. Of course anyone would say that if JoeBob argued that killing a chicken and dousing himself with blood prior to operating on a patient, it couldn’t possibly be allowed, regardless of JoeBob’s sincerity in his belief. But doesn’t prevention of contamination and infection trump ALL sincere belief? Shouldn’t it? Why is it even a question?
Examine this case even more closely. Do these people really think that their holy book literally meant that even the mere touching of alcohol (that would sicken or kill them if ingested) is forbidden, even when the purpose of doing so is to save the lives of others? What happened to the argument that Islam was a religion of peace? This is nitpicking the details of a book meant to give lessons to desert dwellers a thousand or more years ago. Perhaps instead of treating people who take it literally with respect and deference, we should treat them as delusional.
What if people started taking other works of fiction literally? Would we be so quick to bend our backs to accommodate, say, an elected official who sincerely believes that Voldemort has yet again returned for revenge, and that the official has access to dark magics? Perhaps when he starts insisting on using his pet owl in place of email, and stocks up on mysterious and bubbly liquids for his private experiments, we’ll find a nice padded room for him. In the meantime, we elevate nutters who assert that their savior died and resurrected (and will return soon (very soon, I say, within our lifetime!) and take them to a magical place where they will be able to watch everyone else suffer in eternal flame), and that they have the ability not only to communicate directly with the creator of the universe, but that that very same creator grants wishes to the most pious, and when we allow veiled images of completely unidentifiable women to adorn identification badges, and when we allow the dissection of our baby boys and girls, and when we reserve special rights for some people while excluding those who don’t meet a divine criteria, and when we threaten to throw people in prison for uttering any critical remark about our deeply held beliefs… we’ve gone too far. We’ve been too far, and we’re in great danger of allowing more of it.
Fuck it. Go drink your Kool Aid with a bit of rum. But not on Sunday.
