His examples are very carefully cherry-picked to support his claims. I'm to going to agree or disagree with his conclusions here, but an example that is useful for the purpose of discussion is the subject of turbans, such as the dastaars worn by the Sikhs he discusses.

At one time the uniform for a police officer in Toronto (and I'm sure everywhere else in Canada) included a cap that was quite inconsistent with the Sikh practice for men to wear a dastaar.

The law prohibiting discrimination against persons by reason of their religion is defined to include directly passing over someone because of their beliefs. But it is also held to include indirectly passing them over by way of rules and regulations that are inconsistent with their beliefs and practices unless there are strong reasons to enforce them.

The rules about uniforms were in a grey area. There are good reasons for police officers to wear a consistent uniform. But would a Sikh in a dastaar really violate those good reasons? The police changed its rules and regulations to include the dastaar as an option, with its colour and the inclusion of a badge on the head just as the original cap holds a badge.

Kirpans are a very contentious subject and reasonable people can and do disagree on how they should be handled. But dastaars are an example of places where a failure to provide legal protection for people to practice their religion could create an indirect discrimination that is inconsistent with Canadian values.

The author points out that if there's no good reason for a rule, it should be abolished for everyone. One interesting point of discussion is this: If there is no specific rule protecting the freedom to practice one's religion, how would rules such as the uniform rule for the police ever evolve?

That's one hell of a linkbait headline that the Ottowa Citizen came up with. A more accurate description of the article's thesis would be "freedom of religion can be derived from other rights which are explicitly recognized, like freedom of speech and association, and does not need to be explicitly protected as long as those other rights are genuinely protected." Put like that, it sounds a lot less controversial.

Here's a good article by Christopher Hitchens on freedom of religion: http://www.slate.com/id/2266154. Some examples of where he thinks religion oversteps its bounds:

- Mormon polygamy

- Christian sects that disapprove of medicine

- Ritual circumcision (especially when the mohel sucks off the debris from the penis with his mouth)

I would also add to that list the ritual slaughter of animals. Kosher and Halal both mandate that an animal cannot be stunned with a captive-bolt stunner before having their throats cut, and must be fully conscious. Needless to say, this cruelty only persists because of "freedom of religion".

If you ever want to get away with things you otherwise couldn't get away with, freedom of religion is probably the most potent argument you could unleash.

That's silly. Many laws are meant to minimize people harming each other. For example, the point of laws that control whether a child may bring a dagger to school is for the safety of minors, who don't have the neurobiological facilities to make good decisions (e.g. whether or not to bring a knife to school, or whether or not to use it). I imagine it's easily demonstrable that enforcement of those rules yields less stabbings than an "everyone bring your knives" policy.

Now, before you think it, nobody is saying that such restrictions on freedom are the proper long term solution to stopping kids stabbing each other, and better solutions should be put in place, but in the meantime, lives are literally at stake. Of course, it's also easily demonstrable that Sikh children don't really ever kill each other with their ceremonial daggers.

So frankly, I don't see a good argument as to why the law should never use race as a metric to optimize safety for minors while not infringing on the ceremonial customs of certain groups.

Freedom of religion is something else than making exceptions to other laws because of religion.

Freedom of religion is the right to believe whatever you want and not be discriminated because of it. There needs to be a freedom of religion because there is such a strong tendency to discriminate against minority religions.

Similarly the law needs to be the same for men and women, but the tendency to discriminate is so strong that there needs to be a law against discrimination based on gender.

Let's leave aside the fact that it's no business of the government whether we are disrespectful to each other's religions, as well as Justice Charron's call for schools to indoctrinate children.

Schools have to indoctrinate children. They're freaking _children_. It's normal childish behavior to lie when they're afraid of getting in trouble, hit other children or destroy their property when they get angry, disrupt lessons when they're bored, and ridicule others when they sense weakness. Discipline and indoctrination about proper behavior can't stop when parents drop their children off at school. If you don't want your kid indoctrinated by someone else, if you can't handle the idea of your kid being partly raised by people who may have different ideas from you, then school just isn't going to work. Forget about school, and forget about tee ball, summer camp, piano lessons, hell, forget about church, because you don't know the exact behavioral standards the Sunday school teachers might enforce. Just keep your child at home and you never have to worry about anyone indoctrinating your kid except you.

You know, I get the funny feeling that some of my fellow atheists believe that if we got rid of "freedom of religion", it'd only be those crazy religionists who'd be affected or restricted, while we could gloat on the sidelines.

Considering that those of us in the US had to have a Supreme Court case to protect us from being forced to take part in group prayers in school, the far more likely case is that without a protected freedom of religion, the majority merrily pushes around various minorities on a religious basis.

Look at how poorly Muslims poll and how they're demonized by many in the US - and then recall that polls say Americans regard atheists even more negatively.

(And no, Canada is no utopia devoid of religious bullying.)

The problem with laws and regulations kowtowing to religion is who is the arbiter of authentic religions vs. other arbitrary mumbo jumbo? What stops me (or L. Ron Hubbard) from inventing a religion specifically contrary the law so I can evade responsibility for paying tax, enslavement, or eating babies?

I've come to realize that no moral issues can be boiled down into black and white. All moral debates have strong examples on either side.

The goal of government, however, is not to take a stance on moral debates. It's to create laws that are amenable to both situations.

I believe with this professor is trying to say is that the constitution, or written law, should not include laws that are categorically protective of civil liberties that may not be culturally acceptable. We need to break down civil liberties in this particular arena into more granular cases and judge based on those cases as opposed to an overarching blank check for religion.

Your religion must be private.

If you intend to make religion public via pony tails, emblems, beards, burkah, turbans etc, you're advertising your religion viz http://goo.gl/dHSA8 Govt will regulate every advertisement.