Last Thursday, The New York Times published an article about Orthodox Jewish men refusing to sit next to women they are not related to when boarding planes. This raises the question: At what point does one person’s religious freedom end and another’s basic rights begin?
While many Orthodox Jewish rabbis have condemned the practice of refusing to sit next to women on planes, some continue the practice. These have even resulted in up to 11-hour delays as passengers refuse to switch seats in protest.
Obviously, seating preferences need to be communicated to the airline in advance. Women can’t just be expected to bend to someone’s whims because of religion. It is not their responsibility to move, particularly if that woman sought to reserve a specific seat for whatever reason. Maybe she wanted an aisle seat, or maybe she wanted to sit in the emergency exit row to get more leg room. If the airline expects people to move, it must offer them a similar seat.
Modern religion doesn’t give one the right to inconvenience others or change what they do. The idea that women who are seated next to Orthodox Jewish men must move is sexist. Now, if someone asks politely, that’s fine, but they have to be OK with the other person refusing to move. They certainly cannot keep a flight from taking off because their seating preference was not accommodated.
Most people agree that the burden is on the person with the religious seating preference to figure out the seating arrangement ahead of time or ask politely. People who travel with children have to deal with the same thing — either checking in ahead of time or relying on the politeness of the other passengers to accommodate their preferred seating. This means they try to avoid wasting time during boarding or potentially delaying a flight.
Overall, this is not unreasonable. But once their seating preferences start delaying flights, it becomes a problem.
Luckily, this sort of seating preference seems to be decried from within the Orthodox Jewish community, but it mirrors what is going on with the Christian right in the U.S., which has started emphasizing the need to protect the Judeo-Christian heritage of the U.S. This causes religious preferences to turn extreme.
Ted Cruz called supporting marriage equality a gay “jihad,” comparing activists to terrorists, and interpreted the first amendment as a “God-given right to seek out and worship God.” According to a Pew Research survey, Christians currently make up 78.4 percent of the U.S. population.
No one is trying to take away Christians’ rights to express their religion; odds are if they did, it would be unsuccessful given how many Christians there are in the U.S.
Religion should not be accepted as an excuse for denying the rights of others — whether it’s through racism, sexism or homophobia. Just as women having the right to sit where they want on a plane does not take away the rights of Orthodox Jewish men, marriage equality does not take away the rights of the Christian right to marry who they want to marry. Using religion to back up unfair laws does not make them any less discriminatory.
We as a country need to be very careful about what we will let religion excuse because it is often an indication of a larger problem.
Nicole Dan is a UF political science freshman. Her column appears on Tuesdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 4/14/2015]
