Columnist Leonard Pitts today expounds on an unfortunate tendency of Moslem taxi drivers at the Minnesota-St. Paul airport to refuse to pick up fares who happen to be carrying suspicious-looking bottles. Islam, after all, frowns on alcohol. So do I, for that matter, though I pretty much frown on it only for myself and not, like the taxi drivers, for everybody else.
Regular readers of my blog, if any, have probably noticed that I tend to defend Islam against its unthinking and fearful detractors here in the United States. Nonetheless, I was a little put off by the following passage that Pitts quoted from Khalid Elmasry, spokesman for the Muslim American Society of Minnesota:
In an environment of fear and misunderstanding of everything Muslim, tolerance has become too much to ask.
Khalid, tolerance is a two-way street. As long as the fares in question do not, upon entering a taxi driven by a Moslem, in some misguided spirit of good fellowship crack their bottles and attempt to force a swig of their contents upon the drivers, the drivers also have a duty to practice tolerance and not leave these undoubted sinners standing helpless on the sidewalk. Perhaps their dedication to a bottle of Champagne from France will indeed condemn them to Gehenna, but that is their problem, and it is not the duty of a taxi driver to punish them for their misguided preferences. The duty of a taxi driver is to pick up fares and drive them to their destinations.