Faith and Ethics: When Values Collide

As an undergrad I spent a summer working at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which, at the time, was responsible for investigating complaints of discrimination throughout the province.  One day during that summer I attended a panel discussion at a training conference.  The topic was something to the effect of, “Gay Marriage and Islam: When Rights Collide”.  The panel included several religious leaders from the local Muslim community arguing essentially that gay marriage poses and threat to the institution of marriage and that, in turn, it threatens the moral fabric of society at large.  Joining them were two (maybe three, I can’t recall) apologists from the commission who tried their best to appease the religious sensibilities of their fellow panel members while ensuring that the discussion didn’t veer off completely into the realm of homophobia.

I can remember thinking to myself, these people are being given a forum to espouse anti-gay beliefs that run directly counter to principles enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights.  And they are being abetted by the very organization that is charged with upholding those principles.  Only an extremely powerful force could ever make this situation possible.

This same force is the reason why each year 250 schools in the city of Toronto, receive public funding to teach their students that, among other things, homosexuality is against divine law.  This message is accompanied by no supporting evidence whatsoever, besides a centuries-old book that is rife with internal contradictions and some of the most vile moral teachings ever recorded.  But these schools are members of the Toronto District Catholic School Board (and its French analog, Conseil scolaire de district catholique Centre-Sud), so the rules that govern other aspects of our political and social interaction, simply don’t apply.

According to the Ontario Human Rights Act, everyone in Ontario has the right to freedom from discrimination of the basis of religion (or creed as it’s referred to in the text).  But what does that mean?  What is religion but a set of political, social, and behavioural edicts that devotees subscribe to on the basis of faith?

This issue made headlines in the United States last week when in response to the recent Christmas day terror incident, several conservative media pundits suggested that airport security should specifically target Muslim passengers for extra scrutiny.  One commentator by the name of Mike Gallagher even went so far as to say that “There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed.”

I certainly don’t endorse this statement and I’m convinced that they are motivated by more than just security concerns (i.e. racism).  But I think there is another extreme in this discourse that is equally indefensible from both a logical and ethical standpoint.  It’s the notion that we cannot apply separate treatment to individuals on the basis of what they believe and their associations with others who hold similar beliefs.  Not only is this position morally untenable, but it inevitably leads to hypocricy since we as a society regularly discriminate against individuals when their beliefs in unpopular propositions come to light.  For example people have lost their jobs for claiming that the HIV virus doesn’t exist, or that Jews are the cause of all the world’s problems.  The latter view has even landed some people in jail, and rightfully so.  But when someone’s belief in equally odious and unsupported ideas are rooted in religion, somehow they are automatically shielded from such consequences.

Is this state of affairs just?  As a black man, would I be wrong for firing one of my employees once I found out that he is a member of a religious group that teaches that black skin is the result of a punishment doled out by god for acts of evil committed thousands of years ago?  If I were a woman, or anyone who cares about womens rights for that matter, would I be wrong for refusing to hire a known member of a church or temple that holds that any woman found guilty of fornication must be stoned to death?  How far must states go in order to protect this freedom from so-called “religious discrimination”?  Should members of the Westboro Baptist Church be protected?

What this doctrine of faith privilege does is to turn basic ethical axioms on their head.  It’s perfectly okay to believe and preach ideas that society and the law has deemed unacceptable as long as those beliefs are rooted in faith.  In fact, the more irrational, unsupported and faith-based those beliefs are, the greater the legal protection you will be afforded.  At least when someones views are purely political, they can provide some logical path that has allowed them to arrive at their conclusions however backward they may be.  Religious beliefs offer no such justification and therefore there is no mechanism through which they can be challenged.

In his zeitgiest-shifting treatise, The End of Faith, Sam Harris posits that if it hadn’t been for the forces of religion, human beings might have travelled to space centuries sooner?  While I believe this idea has merit, it appears that space travel (and science in general) was among the last of the cognitive disciplines to be tragically forestalled by religion.  Ethics was the first.