Special Rights for Religious Heterosexuals

"Lifesite" also reports on Canadian provincial marriage commissioners seeking special rights. Apparently, unlike everyone else they believe they should be entitlted to do their jobs only when they want to, and get paid for it anyway.

Specifically, Canadian conservatives are pressing for passage of a bill which would give marriage commissionsers the special right to choose when they want to refuse to do their jobs on religious grounds, so they can refuse to preside at the civil marriage ceremonies of gay couples, who have the legal right to marry in Canada.

So, does this mean that the conservatives support the right of, say, a Hasidic Jewish marriage commissioner to refuse to marry a couple if the man doesn't have a full beard? How about an islamic emergency room surgeon who wants to refuse to operate on women who aren't wearing burkas? When does this special right to discriminate on the basis of religion end? And doesn't this mean that a high caste Hindu could get a job as a sewer worker and then do no work at all but demand to get paid because it's against their religion for them to work with excrement?

We all have things we don't approve of in life. There are jobs where the employee has to do things that we may not approve of, like trying to sell extended warrantys to people purchasing televisions or telling the purchaser of a software package who has found a bug that it's really supposed to work that way. The rest of us have a choice: we can suck it up and do the job, or we can tell the employer no and risk being fired. Why should religious people get a special exemption from doing what they're paid for?