I was browsing through the News-Gazette Online Web log section last night when I saw that Rhonda Robinson, a regular News-Gazette blogger mentioned a story about Muslim taxi drivers in Minneapolis. It seems that a growing number of drivers, starting with just one a few years ago, but now quite a few, refuse to take passengers who are carrying alcohol in their bags or on their person.

According to the US News and World Report’s interview with the Minneapolis airport’s director, this amounts to approximately three fare refusals a day. Additionally, the taxi drivers have been lobbying against the resulting practice of making them go to the back of taxi line after a fare refusal, a line that becomes very long during rush hours and numerous flight arrivals.

The airport proposed in September that taxi drivers who don’t accept passengers with alcohol for religious reasons have a special colored light on the top of their vehicles to signal to passengers that they will not be driven if they are carrying alcohol. On Oct. 10, the airport officials reversed this decision, citing in a press release that “other options will be considered.” Some conservative commentators, like Daniel Pipes of the New York Sun, were very strong opponents of allowing taxi drivers to turn passengers away. As of today, no new rules have been instituted; if the drivers turn people away, they must return to the back of taxi line.

It is unclear what tenet of Islamic law prohibits these drivers from taking passengers with alcohol; there are passages against consuming alcohol in the Qur`an, however this does not necessarily seem to exclude taking money for driving people with alcohol or who consume alcohol. And, of course, it presents a dangerous slippery slope; if Muslim taxi drivers can turn away passengers with alcohol, can they also turn away people of other faiths? What about mothers who have had children out of wedlock? Can Jewish drivers turn away someone eating a roast beef sandwich and drinking milk in their taxi?

What is interesting about conservative fear and commentary on this issue, and others like it, is its blatant hypocrisy. I wholeheartedly agree that taxi drivers should not be able to impose their religious beliefs on customers without paying some sort of financial price; they will lose many customers. If their religious beliefs come first, then sacrifices should be made in public life to hold particular kinds of jobs and do particular kinds of things. But I also think that deeply religious Christian pharmacists have a duty to fill all prescriptions, including ones which may not align with their religious beliefs, or pay the price by changing professions or losing their job.

Daniel Pipes, the most vocal conservative and anti-Islamicist columnist and academic, says smugly that the taxi driver’s actions “.intrude Islamic law into a mundane transaction of American commercial life.” I don’t see Pipes arguing, anywhere in my research about him, that Christian law shouldn’t be inserted into mundane transactions in the American commercial life of women who choose to go on birth control or get medicinal abortions.

The fact is that our personal religious choices are important, but not important enough to impose upon others, particularly in the realm of public commercial life. Some conservatives play up our freedoms to buy, say, and do anything as long as it does not harm or impose upon others. They expect taxi drivers to adhere to these claims, but say nothing about the doctors and pharmacists, whom they support, inserting their religion into the lives of patients and customers.

The right policy is to leave religion out of public life, particularly in a country as ethnically and religiously diverse as the United States. When we begin making exceptions for faiths we like more, or that are majorities, or that are particularly vehement in their convictions, we lose the ability to have a thriving and popular public sector. But, of course, this doesn’t just apply to Muslim taxi drivers. It applies to everyone.