Religion vs. Rights in An Election Year, Heaven Help Us

Mixing religion with politics can be no less hazardous to a politician than mixing aviation with alcohol.

You could hear that in the awkward response by Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and current Republican presidential candidate, as CNN's Alisyn Camerota asked him whether a Muslim flight attendant should be able to deny alcohol to passengers.

The question was not hypothetical. ExpressJet flight attendant Charee Stanley has filed a federal complaint after she was suspended for refusing to serve alcohol. She cited her Muslim religion, to which she says she converted two years ago, according to news reports.

Her complaint was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just days before Rowan County, Ky., clerk Kim Davis made national news by going to jail for five days for contempt of court rather than issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

As news cameras rolled, Davis walked out of jail after Labor Day accompanied by Huckabee in what looked and sounded like a mixture of a Huckabee rally and a religious revival -- while fellow Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas applauded sternly from the sidelines, outside camera range.

Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" played over loudspeakers, much to the dismay, TMZ reports, of Survivor's lead singer, Frankie Sullivan. Rock, like religion, doesn't always mix with politics, especially when the composer disapproves.

Huckabee has argued against the principle of judicial supremacy that makes the Supreme Court the final arbiter of constitutionality. In defense of Davis, he has described the Dred Scot decision, which upheld slavery, as "the law of the land" and used the fact that nobody follows it today as justification for defying the high court's same-sex marriage decision.

Actually, the Dred Scot decision was rendered invalid by the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. But Huckabee is not about to let inconvenient legal facts get in the way of his constitutional argument.

"Should Lincoln have been put in jail? Because he ignored (Dred Scott)," Huckabee asked on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday. "That's the fundamental question."

Yet Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, sounded considerably more subdued when CNN's Camerota asked him whether he thought flight attendant Stanley has the right to refuse to serve alcohol.

"Historically we have made accommodations for people with religious convictions," Huckabee said. "You've seen it in Michigan where they spent $25,000 providing foot baths for Muslims students." He also mentioned the prayer mats given to Muslim detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

When asked again, Huckabee repeated that people try to make accommodations wherever they can. "Sometimes maybe it can't be done," he said, "but in this case there was no attempt to make an accommodation to Kim Davis."

Actually there was. Other Kentucky clerks who have religious objections to same-sex marriage have been able to delegate the issuing of licenses to their deputies. But Davis interpreted her individual right to refuse as a reason to bar anyone else in her department from issuing marriage licenses, too.

When her incarceration freed her deputies to issues licenses, the judge let her walk.

Stanley's case has a little different twist. The 40-year-old has been a flight attendant with Atlanta-based ExpressJet Airlines for three years but converted to Islam two years ago, according to the Washington Post.

In June, she asked her supervisor at ExpressJet for a religious accommodation, asking if another attendant could serve drinks while she did something else. At first the accommodation was made, according to her EEOC complaint. But in early August another employee filed a complaint and later in the month the airline reversed itself.

Stanley was placed on administrative leave without pay for 12 months, according to her complaint, and could be terminated.

Kim Davis made news by flatly refusing as an act of conscience to do the job to which she was elected. Stanley, according to her complaint, asked for an accommodation and received it, only to have it taken away.

If Huckabee and his allies are ready to rally to Davis' defense, they should be no less supportive of Stanley -- or does fairness take a back seat to politics in election years?

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)