Can Muslims Working At The DMV Refuse To Issue Driver's Licenses To Women In USA?

[kpete]

The GOP’s “personal responsibility” lie: How the Kim Davis saga reveals the core of Republican hypocrisy
One of the Republican Party's biggest obsessions has been revealed for a lot of B.S. VIDEO
BOB CESCA

.........talk about white privilege, for god-fearing white people such as Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, personal responsibility is optional. Not only that, "religious freedom" is their get-out-of-jail-free card, as Cesca observes:

For now, it looks as if Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Fox News Channel agree that Davis, an elected government worker, should keep her job despite refusing to perform her professional obligations, and should face no legal repercussions for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after being judicially compelled to do so. But Davis isn’t self-employed. She doesn’t get to revise her own job description on-the-fly. Only her employers retain that discretion, and her employers happen to be the people of Rowan County, Kentucky.

Huckabee and the others believe she shouldn’t be held personally responsible — accountable for her actions, as President Bush said in 2000 — for her actions in defiance of the Supreme Court; in defiance of her job description; and especially in defiance of a U.S. District Court judge who happened to have been appointed by the Texan in the video above. If the GOP was truly concerned with personal responsibility, they’d support Davis’s posture against same-sex marriage but accept the fact that she’s justifiably being held accountable for her actions. More than that, they’d encourage her to resign her post. Davis’ GOP supporters are doing exactly none of that.

There’s a meme circulating Facebook at the moment questioning whether Muslims working at a department of motor vehicles can refuse to issue driver’s licenses to women. The obvious point being that the GOP appears to be getting behind the idea that both public and private sector workers can refuse to do their jobs with impunity as long as they can recite a biblical verse to back it up. It appear as if they do, but only when it comes to same-sex marriage or contraception....


http://www.salon.com/2015/09/06/the_gops_personal_responsibility_lie_how_the_kim_davis_saga_reveals_the_core_of_republican_hypocrisy/

[Igel]

1. It's more complicated than that.

So this is a strawman.

Would somebody opposed to sending Japanese to internment camps apply for a job that involved rounding up Japanese to send to internment camps? Would somebody opposed to doing abortions train as a surgeon and apply for a job that requires him to do abortions?

No.

Now, would somebody who wants to work for state or federal law enforcement sign up for a job involving state or federal law enforcement? Sure. Would somebody who wants to do surgery train as a surgeon and apply at a hospital for a surgeon's job? Sure.

What if after he's hired the job description changes to now require federal law enforcement folk to round up Japanese and send them to internment camps? What if after he's hired, the surgeon's told by the hospital that a new part of his job duties is to perform abortions? Ah, things change. What was a good fit with a person's ethics and conscience is now a bad fit.

It was the same at UCLA in the '90s when affirmative action was banned. A lot of admissions officers liked affirmative action. They were helping to increase diversity or helping poor kids advance socially and economically. It was a good fit with their consciences. Then affirmative action was banned. Their consciences said that they were to help these kids but the law said that race and such could not be considered. Their response was simple: They immediately found ways, all illegal, to get around it. "You just copy down the wrong number. If Anderson, J. is black and has a low ranking but Anderson, I. has a high ranking, who's to say you didn't make a mistake reversing their rankings? If Jeffers has a ranking of 690, writing 960 is an easy transposition to make by accident. You drop the papers on the floor and the second page comes loose on two kids' files, it's simple to put the high-scoring kids' paper in the low-scoring kid's folder and not notice that the names don't match. Then you merely use the accurate-yet-incorrect number in your evaluation. By the time any of these mistakes are caught, well, the wrong kid's been admitted and who wants the media firestorm of unadmitting what turns out to be primarily poor black and Latino kids.

This was considered a good thing. Because it comported with the kind of conscience we like when faced with changing circumstances that admissions folk didn't agree with. Find the difference between Davis and these folk and you'll find that it's all in what we think is where society should be headed and placing ourselves over the law when we don't like the law. In a sense it's civil disobedience. We like our civil disobedience and think it should be praised and not punished. We hate their civil disobedience and go all zero-tolerance and broken-windows on them.

Note that the ultimate response in UC was to find proxies for race in California. You pick geographic areas, decide to weight low SES kids' applications, you pick out underperforming schools. These correlate strongly with race and ethnicity. Took a few years to work out how to tweak the criteria, but the affirmative action targets were firmly back in place under different guise. The law was circumvented and the mechanisms were pronounced "stronger" because there were fewer restrictions on the weightings and race-based challenges were harder to pursue, and the PR--suddenly they could help poor whites! Not that poor whites were often the target; they were a teflon shield against "racists." Plus who's going to object to helping the poor except people we don't like? Even secularists and vehement proponents of the wall of separation typically fall silent when religionists say, "As ye do unto the least of these" and claim that as justification for state policies and actions. Because it suits their conscience and where they think society should be headed.