The Cult of Cohen, a loving and compassionate faith-based thing that resides primarily in my mother’s living room and in the newsroom of Banker & Tradesman, believes that God speaks to us all through the Cohen column.
We are a low-key bunch; rather than making joyous noise unto the Lord, we sit quietly and meditate about Cohen and his written stuff. You would hardly even know we weren’t Congregationalists or Presbyterians or something, except for our dress code and long beards (even the women).
The only religious discrimination we face is from the editor, who tripped over one of the long beards, and objected to our obligatory, unfashionably wide, polyester ties. He suggested that we must reflect the lifestyle choices of bankers and tradesmen and other assorted heathens — all of whom shave with four-bladed razors and wear narrow silk ties.
We’ve been waiting patiently for the appropriate time to wreak our revenge, because an angry, vengeful God is part of the Cohen theology. And now, the revelation has come: the Warren Group and its editor will be afflicted by a storm of locusts and ACLU attorneys.
A Rastafarian technician at a Jiffy Lube in Hadley won a Supreme Judicial Court in December, affirming his right to keep his beard, despite a company policy that all God’s children employed at Jiffy Lube be clean-shaven.
Although First Amendment law on matters of employer-mandated restrictions is still a considerable mess, the state high court uttered the magic words in the Rastafarian case: employers must make “reasonable accommodations” for religious stuff, including beards and, presumably, Cohen worship.
A lower court, under the influence of the Devil and the Gillette razor people, had ruled in favor of the Jiffy Lube, suggesting that the company had a reasonable right to control its public image, which apparently wasn’t all hairy and Rasta-like.
Free At Last
In the 1970s, Congress tinkered with civil rights law, to require employers to make such “reasonable accommodation” for religious practices of employees — and the pagans of the executive suites have spent the last 30 years or so attempting to figure out exactly what constitutes a religion, what constitutes “reasonable,” and what is simply a Cohen worshiper run amok, causing “undue hardship” to the boss.
In 2000, the New York attorney general’s office bludgeoned Sears into allowing its Jewish and other Saturday-Sabbath believers to take the day off, even if the Gods of Human Resources required them to work.
This government expansiveness in defense of religious practice requires some creative interpretation of the First Amendment, which sort of says, but not really: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, unless your boss makes you shave or work on Saturday.”
Congress, being the sneaky place that it is, chose to play games with civil rights legislation, rather than First Amendment jurisprudence, to offer up some much-needed protection for Cohen-worship and the like in the workplace.
When these kinds of cases stagger into court, many crafty lower-court judges drag lawyers for both sides into the back office and scream at them to reach an accommodation. There’s a sense of Martin Luther in that: “…if all the world were composed of real Christians, that is, true believers, no prince, king, sword of law would be needed…”
Jesuit scholar John Courtney Murray argued in his 1960 book, “We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflection on the American Proposition,” that an important part of the “freedom of religion” itch in America was a recognition that “persecution and discrimination were as bad for business affairs as they were for affairs of the soul.”
Of all the First Amendment quirkiness that comes with the promise of freedom of religion, none is more weird than when government is inclined to tip-toe into the workplace and boss the boss around in matters ecclesiastical.
In Massachusetts, the old Cambridge Platform of 1648 promised that while government would not meddle unnecessarily in church affairs, the magistrate was still free to act “in matters of Godliness.”
If that seems confusing, well, that’s how we Cohen worshippers like it. A confused boss will allow us the freedom we need to worship that fella who writes the column.
