Mick Hartley

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Wedges (Thin Ends of)

Further to the revelation yesterday that some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because it offends their religious beliefs, here’s the chairman of the General Medical Council’s education committee, Professor Peter Rubin, saying what needs to be said:

[H]e said trainees who refused to carry out these parts of their courses would not be allowed to graduate because ‘prejudicing treatment on the grounds of patients’ gender or their responsibility for their condition would run counter to the most basic principles of ethical medical practice.’

Though it’s less clear-cut, and certainly of less significance, I don’t see why the same argument shouldn’t apply to those Muslims employed in Sainsbury’s or Boots who refuse to sell alcohol or the morning-after pill. It runs contrary to the most basic principles of free commercial transactions that shop employees should refuse to deal in goods which the shop itself has deemed part of its business. If an item is legal, the shop supplies it, and the customer wishes to buy it, then an employee has absolutely no right to refuse to sell it. If it’s such an affront to their religious convictions, they should seek alternative employment.

Though I’m not normally a great fan of thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments, I’ll make an exception here. In fact the beginning of the wedge may well have been the decision to grant Sikhs exemption from the law requiring motorbike riders to wear helmets back in 1976. This whole area is well discussed in Brian Barry’s “Culture and Equality“. If helmets are deemed necessary by law, then no exemptions should be made. The Motor Cycle Crash Helmet (Religious Exemptions) Act was the classic, and I believe the first, example in the UK of that misplaced multiculturalism whose effects, we’re now beginning to realise, are by no means all benign. If employees can refuse to serve us because they disapprove of what we’re buying, then soon we’ll have supermarkets refusing to sell us food they’ve decided is bad for us. That really would be ridiculous.

Oh wait….

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6 responses to “Wedges (Thin Ends of)”

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    I didn’t mind the crash helmets exemption, just as I don’t mind when minor rearrangements are made for Jews e.g. in the timing of University exams. My objection is to the failure to establish that such little lubrications of life are not to be allowed to be the thin end of the wedge, the failure to say “not if it harms the patients or the customers”.

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  2. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Well no one minded the crash helmets exemption at the time. It made everyone feel nice and liberal and multicultural, without any price to be paid. Anyone who objected must have been racist or something. That’s why it was a classic thin end of the wedge case. But it was still a bad law – allowing exemption on the grounds of someone’s religious belief for a law that applied to everyone else.
    Minor rearrangemnets in university exam timetables is a different matter altogether: that’s just a question of common courtesy, surely.

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  3. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    My view on crash helmets may have been biased by my preference that no-one be obliged to wear one. I did wonder whether to say “lubrication” or “courtesy” on the exam business, but you could, if you wanted to, say that it was wrong that gentiles take an exam on Saturday morning and Jews on Monday – I mean, they might get sight of the question paper, mightn’t they? And might not observant Jews try to bully non-observant Jews into demanding to take the exam on Monday too? One can think of all sorts of hypothetical objections, and still I don’t mind because I’ve seen no sign of wedge-building. Whereas the shameful success of some Sikhs in getting a play closed – now that was something to object to. I suppose a hard man might recommend immediate withdrawal of the helmet concession in response. Similarly, if all sorts of people start demanding exam concessions on the Jewish model, where can we stop? No exams in Ramadan?

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  4. Noga Avatar
    Noga

    University exams on Saturday? It’s the first I hear it is possible. Isn’t there a weekend in the UK? Is this a hypothetical situation or something that really takes place?
    If so, here is a question: What is the difference between Jews being obliged to take exams on Saturday in a Cambridge university and Iranian Jewish kids being obliged, by law, to attend schools on Saturdays and recite every morning the mantra: Death to Israel!
    One possibility that comes to mind is the question of intent. In the Iranian case, malevolence seems to be the primary motive. But then, I looked again at dearieme’s comment and noticed the insertion of bad faith and bullying into Jewish motivation, and I wondered, again. What is the difference?

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  5. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    It was certainly the rule in my time at Cambridge that Jewish students who had exams postponed from Saturday were kept in isolation until it was time for them to take the exam. So far as I am aware these arrangements always worked perfectly. Today, when exam timetables are created by computers, it is possible to take candidates’ religious requirements into account when arranging the timetable in the first place.
    Everyone, I am sure, would dearly love for there to be no Saturday exams. If they still exist in many universities (including my own), it is because there is no other way to fit all the exams that are set into the time available for sitting them, while ensuring (for example) that no student has two exams at the same time, remembering that students may be taking all sorts of different combinations of subjects.

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  6. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    You tend to find subjects that are lectured on Saturday morning being examined on Saturday morning: it’s a pretty obvious part of the algorithm for designing the exam timetable. You lecture on Saturday morning because (i) you always have, the notion of a two-day weekend being a modern decadence, and (ii) beause it’s far easier to fit in courses of 3-lectures-per-week into a six day week.

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