Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Religious Exemptions in Law

My Positions

  1. The law should apply to everyone equally. A sincerely held belief is not a licence, and "it is my religion" is not an argument that the law should recognise.
  2. The same act is not made lawful by a religious motive. Cutting a child's genitals, killing an animal without stunning it, refusing a child medical treatment, discriminating in employment, and withholding vaccines are what they are regardless of who is doing them and why.
  3. Reasonable accommodation (dress, holidays, prayer breaks, a Sikh's turban in place of a helmet) is fine where the cost falls on the believer alone. The line is harm to third parties, and above all to children, who did not choose the religion and cannot leave it.

Notes

  1. Children's bodies. Female genital mutilation is rightly a crime in the UK at every age and in every form. Non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys is lawful on no better ground than custom; a German court held in 2012 that it was an assault on the child, and the legislature overruled the court within months. Iceland and Denmark have debated bans. My position is that the operation should wait until the person it is performed on can consent to it, which is the rule we apply to every other irreversible, non-therapeutic procedure on a child. The ritual in which the circumciser applies his mouth to the wound has transmitted herpes to infants in New York and killed some of them, and it continues under a religious exemption that would not survive a day if the practice were secular.
  2. Children's lives. British courts will overrule parents who refuse blood transfusions for their children on religious grounds, and they are right to. In most American states, by contrast, a parent who lets a child die of a treatable illness through prayer alone is exempt from the neglect laws that would apply to any other parent, and children die of it every year (Prayer). Religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements have produced measles outbreaks in communities that have them and none in communities that do not (Anti-Vaccine). Exorcism performed on a child with a psychiatric or neurological condition belongs here too (Demons, Possession and Exorcism).
  3. Animals. British law requires animals to be stunned before slaughter and exempts Jewish and Muslim religious slaughter from the requirement. The veterinary profession opposes the exemption on welfare grounds, and the Netherlands, Denmark, Slovenia, and both regions of Belgium have removed it; the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the Belgian ban in 2020. If the stunning rule is justified, and it is, it is justified by what the animal experiences, which does not depend on the slaughterer's beliefs. Labelling is the minimum; ending the exemption is the position.
  4. Employment and services. The Equality Act permits a religious organisation to require its ministers to share its faith, which is reasonable, and it has been stretched to allow faith schools funded by the public to hire and fire teachers, and admit pupils, by religion (Religious Education). Catholic adoption agencies that refused to place children with same-sex couples lost their exemption and closed rather than comply, and were right to lose it. On the other side, I accept the Supreme Court's judgement in the Belfast bakery case: the bakers refused a message, not a customer, and compelled speech is a free-speech matter (Free Speech). The test is whether the believer is declining to act or demanding that someone else bear the cost.
  5. Accommodations I support. Turbans in place of motorcycle helmets, since the risk is the wearer's own. Time off for festivals, on the same terms as anyone's leave. Dress, where it does not impede the job. Prayer space, where it costs no one. Dietary provision in institutions. None of these harms a third party, and a state that refused them would be hostile to religion rather than neutral between religions, which is the distinction Hard Secularism turns on.
  6. The principle. Freedom of religion is the freedom to practise. It is not the freedom to impose, and it is not a different set of laws for people who feel strongly. A right that exists only for the religious is a privilege, and a privilege granted to one religion must in fairness be granted to every religion, including those that have not been invented yet (Scientology). The clean answer is the one for everyone: the same law, with the harm principle as its limit.

Sources

  • Centraal Israëlitisch Consistorie van België and Others v Vlaamse Regering, Case C-336/19, CJEU Grand Chamber, 17 December 2020
  • Landgericht Köln, judgement of 7 May 2012, 151 Ns 169/11, on infant circumcision
  • Lee v Ashers Baking Company Ltd and others [2018] UKSC 49
  • Eweida and Others v United Kingdom (2013) ECHR 37, on religious dress and conscience at work
  • Asser, S. M. and Swan, R., "Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect", Pediatrics 101 (1998)
  • British Veterinary Association, position on non-stun slaughter — https://www.bva.co.uk/take-action/our-policies/non-stun-slaughter/
  • Equality Act 2010, Schedule 9 (occupational requirements) and Schedule 23 (general exceptions)

Also see