When is religious intolerance not religious intolerance?
For me, it’s when you refuse to give somebody special privileges simply because of their religion. This theme has been in the news in Britain today after a Christian woman lost at an employment tribunal, where she claimed she was forced out of her job because she couldn’t work on Sundays.
“An employment tribunal ruled that Celestina Mba, 57, was not constructively dismissed from her job in 2010. Miss Mba, from south London, worked helping children with severe learning difficulties. The council said it had a duty to ensure children had weekend care. Ms Mba worked for Merton Council at Brightwell Respite Care House in Morden for three years.”
I take issue with Miss Mba’s claim that she couldn’t work on Sundays. She wouldn’t work on Sundays, and yet she still applied for a job which requires employees to be available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days of the year. It seems that she also misled her employer when she was interviewed for the job; “she had told her employer she had ‘difficulties’ working on Sundays before she was employed, but did not specify they were religious”.
This is an important ruling, not only because it protects employers from having to make unreasonable concessions on the grounds of religion, but also because it protects other employees – The days when Miss Mba would not work, ultimately have to be worked by somebody else. Is it fair that other people routinely lose their Sundays off because one person claims a religious right to have Sunday as their “day of rest”? I would argue that it is not reasonable at all.
I would also speculate that Sundays would only be the opening salvo in a case like this – Speaking as a healthcare professional, I would love to never have to work on Christmas day, and to always have a long weekend over Easter, but I accept that that’s not going to happen because of the job that I have chosen to do.
Of course, Mis Mba disagrees:
“Miss Mba said: “I am amazed by this decision. I thought that this country was a Christian country. I worked hard for years at my job, and to lose it because of intolerance towards my faith is shocking to me.”
Where to start… Firstly, we are not a “Christian country”, a claim which Christians seem to love throwing out at every opportunity, in complete ignorance of the fact that they’re in a clear minority. Census data suggests that we’re a 71% Christian country, but that’s at complete odds with reality – Most people record themselves as Church of England, simply because until very recently it was the default entry on the Register of Births and therefore on birth certificates. As of 2008, there were actually only about 1.1 million church-goers in the UK – about 1.5% of the population. So no, Miss Mba. We are not a “Christian Country” – and more to the point, even if we were, it would be irrelevant to this case.
Secondly, and this is a point I think I’ve harped on at great length: Failing to give somebody special privileges that they try to demand over everybody else because they’re religious, is not the same thing as being intolerant of their religion.
I am sick to death of this tired old argument; there really is nothing more to say about it than the last paragraph says, and yet religious people continue to scream like spoiled, obnoxious teenagers when expected to abide by the same conditions as everybody else.
I think you’re being rather intolerant toward teenagers, Custador. While they may have issues with keeping things in proportion (which is looking increasingly like a biological issue caused by puberty), they at least tend to complain about some perceived injustice which actually exists.
What I find most troubling about the idea of ‘I thought we were supposed to be a Christian country’ is that, if it were true… what happens to the children who are supposed to be cared for? This woman seems to think there would be nothing wrong with abandoning them for the sake of keeping the sabbath. If everyone in the country were Christian, or at least the vast majority, then there would be no one to do the job she agreed to do, and for some reason she sees this as morally good.
He’s probably talking about those spoiled teens who complain when, say, they don’t get an iPhone 4s for Christmas. They aren’t a majority of course, but there are certainly a lot of people out there who feel entitled (and not just teens and Christians).
This is something that really can’t be said often enough.
Her employer was not being intolerant of Ms Mba’s religion. If her employer was being intolerant of anything, it was Ms Mba’s selfish and self-centred attitude and her casual disregard of the fact that her dishonesty would unreasonably increase the workload faced by her colleagues.
This is a recurring problem. It is also amazing just how quickly the conversation turns nasty when it is suggested that moral scruples have little to do with religious practice.
It is. It happens over and over again, which is why we have too keep on pointing out that these people are selfishly seeking special privileges.
I know very religious people who have to work Sundays who don’t complain.Comes with the job. Deal with it. This is especially true for helping professions and health care workers. Those kids don’t stop being disabled on Sundays.
Yep. I don’t think I’ve ever met a doctor or a nurse who expects to be rota’d off on Sundays.
What about priests? They have to work on Sundays too, don’t they…
This is the kind of story which, given the sketchy coverage from most of the media (including this page), is the perfect launch-pad for people with an axe to grind to start editorialising.
From what I’ve read so far, somebody accepted a job three years ago, on the understanding that she wasn’t willing to work Sundays. For three years, she wasn’t made to work Sundays. There were plenty of other staff willing to work Sundays, and she always managed to swap shifts with a colleague who liked working Sundays.
Suddenly, employer started insisting that she worked Sundays, even though other staff were still willing to swap shifts with her to save her from this. She resigned, religious rights activists encouraged her to claim unfair constructive dismissal, and her legal team paid for by the activists, decided to turn the case into a religious rights case.
From what I’ve read, it would only be a religious rights case if the employer was stopping her from swapping shifts because they wanted her to resign as a result of this, and they wanted her to resign because they didn’t want a Christian on the staff any longer.
No, she told her employer that she would have difficulties working on Sundays, not that she couldn’t work on a Sunday. She got around that by switching shifts with colleagues who were willing – So far, so harmless. HOWEVER! Once she stopped being able to switch with colleagues, i.e. once her colleagues were no longer willing to compromise their own working patterns to accommodate her, she had absolutely NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER to expect her employer to FORCE her colleagues to cover her malingering Christian ass.
Aside from that, her employers have every right to prevent her from switching shifts. In caring professions, we have a thing called “The Skill Mix” – It’s what makes drawing up a rota so difficult. She had no right to come along and vandalise that rota, buggering up the skill mix in the process, as well as potentially putting herself and her colleagues at risk of breaching laws about working hours and breaks.
Oh, and:
Day of rest? Religious activities? No, bullshit.
If I was her employer I would not want her to be switching shifts every week. Not only because of the Skill Mix, but also because it’s unfair on other employees to expect them to cover for her every single week. Sure, they might say they’re willing to do it, but is it just that they feel obliged, or guilted into doing it? Once in a while is fine, but every Sunday is just taking the piss.
As a Christian I find myself unable to agree with Miss Mba. She did indeed mislead her employer.
I used to work in retail and had to work Sunday’s. If I wanted to keep my job I had to work. End of!
The interesting point is that no one seems to have mentioned that Sundays is NOT necessarily the holey day(as in a day full of holes). The buyBull says that on the 7th day you are to rest and praise the lord. OK start counting on any day and on the 7th get on your knees and do jepus. It does not matter which day you choose as they are all pagan. And no one stopped her from doing jepus on any day she could be free to do so.
Actually, the judge did. She basically pointed out that the woman’s Sunday activities were not composed of any activities which were considered core to the Christian faith.
Church on Sunday, one of the more obvious areas where christianity bastardizes it’s judaic roots. Shabbat is Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown. The concept of a holy day is ridiculous in any of its variations, but at least the jews got the math right.
I heard that the Christian holy day was changed to Sunday in order to a. set themselves apart from the Jews b. accommodate Sol Invictus converts.
You folks over there (UK) have a court case. Us folks over here (US) have an entire nation full of these people who either don’t understand, or refuse to acknowledge, that there is any difference between a right and a privilege.
Some of them are running for president.
As long as people like Mrs Mba insist on behaving like spoiled children and have a sense of entitlement big enough to have its own gravitational field, we’ll continue to see stories like this. *sigh*
Sorry, Miss Mba.
If all employees were this kind of Christian, who would care for the children on Sundays? oO
Years ago I lived in the far north-west of Scotland where nothing used to happen on a Sunday. Some people would not watch TV, or drive, or be a passenger in a car on a Sunday unless it was an emergency, or doing ‘god’s work’. Several times I witnessed a church minister in the Outer Hebrides drive to give his Sunday service, passing his wife and children, who were walking to church in the pouring rain!
Suspect much of the feeling behind the article and comments is simply anti-Christian – there is no mention of my work colleagues who take off days such as Eid or for the birthday of the Prophet. Today there is a lot of derision directed against Christians, but a fawning affection for religions other than Christian, particularly in government and education upper echelons. In this country, Muslim and Hindu bus drivers work on Good Friday and Christmas Day, while Christian bus drivers or non-believers work during Eid. Simple really, but not when you are being discriminatory and trying to score points.
As regards Britain being a “Christian country” – when the monarch is the titular head of the country and the parliament as well as the head of the Church of Englend, and Parliament begins with a church service, I suggest Britain is more of a Christian country than is suggested…
The difference is that Eid or Divali are one day in the year. Every Sunday in the year is far more than that. I expect the same reaction if a Muslim takes every Friday off.
And that without considering things like the Skill Set, the fact that the employer was misled…
The feelings are anti-special treatment, not anti-Christian. There is no need to mention Eid because it wasn’t part of the article. There is no fawning affection for other religions, particularly not here. That is simply untrue and I expect you know it.
Simple really, but not when you are being disciminatory and trying to score points, right?
Amirite? Please don’t run away.
I suspect you have read neither the article nor the comments below it.
What is the relevance of that to anything? People can take holidays. The article is about a woman who is refusing to do the job for which she is being paid.
We can sit here and argue abut how to define a Christian country all day, but it would still be irrelevant. Ms Mba accepted a job that required her to be available to work on Sundays – and then refused to do the job she accepted.
This is a selfish and self-centred attitude and if you do detect derision aimed at Christians (which is disputable, to say the least), then I would suggest that it’s the inconsiderate sense of entitlement demonstrated by people like that that provokes it.
Being persecuted is like a badge of office for many Christians. It’s proof (to them and to their buddies) that they are really, really true believers. So they look everywhere for circumstances that they can call being persecuted and find it (in their minds) all over the place. In this case, I’m guessing the lady in question also feels persecuted by the court’s decision, so she shows herself to be a super-Christian.
Heh, the situation I’m in requires that I not only be on call every day of every week, but that I actually be at work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I’m a live-in caretaker for an elderly woman with type 1 diabetes (we still call it brittle diabetes, after how radical her swings in blood sugar can often be) and dementia. My trips outside the house are furtive and hasty things, since at any moment, she could have a nasty fall, have a sugar crash, or decide she wants to cook something on the stove and leave a pile of magazines on the burner. I’ve been awakened into chaos in the early AM hours of the night on many occasions. Consequently, I work on holidays, my birthday, the new year and in the event of cataclysmic nuclear war.
Now imagine if I said that my religion requires that I take one day a week off.