No smoke without flamewar

[j4]

You may recall a bit of a debate recently about whether Christians should be forced to let gay people stay in their bed-and-breakfasts, in which people invented various analogous situations (as people are wont to do) as aids to debate. Here's one we didn't need to invent, from The Times' News in Brief on Monday:

Smoker put out

A smoker was denied cigarettes at a store because the assistant, a Muslim, said it was against her religion to sell tobacco. The woman smoker, 31, had tried to buy cigarettes at W. H. Smith in Cambridge. The company said that the customer should have realised the assistant was Muslim and would not sell tobacco.

How did the Times know that the woman was a smoker? She might have just been buying cigarettes for a friend. ... No, wait. Should smokers be allowed to refuse to be served by a Muslim? ... No, that's not it either. Hang on, I've got it: How can you tell if the checkout assistant is a Muslim? There isn't a punchline, but there probably would be if you started making assumptions like that based on, ooh, I don't know, the c*l**r of someone's sk*n, or their h**dg**r.

I would say "it's not just me, is it?" but a friend recently said (in an entirely other context) "I too spend a lot of time in culture shock at what's supposed to be my own culture." I think that sums it up, really.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Gah, how awful! Mine was nothing like that; I only mentioned a condom breaking when it wasn't even the answer she wanted to the question that was asked (it was "why are you here?" or something and the answer she was looking for ended up being "the people at the sexual-health clinic told me I could go there*." Like I said she explained how it worked and asked if I'd had it in the last month, when my last period had been, and I think that was it.

And it's not usually free from pharmacies, I know, but it was at that one. Perhaps because it's in an area with lots of students and other not-well-off people?

*If it sounds odd that such a place would be referring me elsewhere, I should say that it was only because they were busy and I'd have to wait a long time for something simple, rather than because they didn't do that sort of thing themselves.