Apathy Sketchpad

A while back, there was a story about a woman named Nadia Eweida, who was suspended from her job, a check-in worker with British Airways, because she refused to comply with their uniform code which required her to remove her crucifix necklace. I mention it only now because the employment tribunal she took BA to has concluded. (Honestly, I could do Religious Crackpot Of The Week if weeks had names.)

For what it’s worth, here is my take on it (and therefore also the correct answer, and it also applies to the girl suspended from school for refusing to take off her ridiculous chastity ring): she has no case. The crucifix necklace is an entirely optional part of the Christian faith, and is very possibly a sin. Nobody is being discriminated against; this is just a bog-standard uniform rule which she happens not to like. She can get a job elsewhere. (Or elsewear.)

Of course, you could argue that if she really believes that a crucifix necklace is a requirement of her religion then she is being discriminated against, but that would be wrong on several levels. It’s still an important argument to make, though, as the rebuttals are informative. First, it’s wrong because it assumes that the religious discrimination occurs when she isn’t allowed to follow her religious rules at work and someone of a non-necklace-requiring religion (such as Christianity) would be. This is false. The same rules (no necklaces) apply to both. Discrimination would happen if she was allowed to wear necklaces and people of other religions weren’t. Mostly, though, it’s wrong simply because the alternative would be that all religious rules trump all company policies and laws in all cases, and that would be ridiculous because religious laws may as well, for all the grounding in reality they posses, just be made up on the spot. Someone could start a religion whose scriptures were a wiki and they’d suddenly find themselves high above the law, looking down on all the policemen and saying, “ha, you look like ants! And, like ants, I could kill you all and you couldn’t stop me!”

Of course, real life rarely gets these things right. In this case, it was got so badly wrong that British Airways offered Eweida £8,500 (that’s about a billion US dollars) to settle out of court, although this was mostly just an effort to get the bad press to go away. Eweida, though, much to her credit and the furthering of justice, told them exactly where they could shove their money, and then said “I’m speechless really because I went to the tribunal to seek justice,” when the judge correctly ruled in BA’s favour. Eweida demonstrated further that she has failed to understand the issues at hand in her own story by adding “I cannot be gagged about my faith. It’s not over until God says it’s over.”

I wish more people took that attitude — if enough do, it’s statistically likely that at least one will be struck by lightning soon after mouthing off.