The driver's licence argument is not about a claim that a culture or religion should be exempt from national law: it is about the argument whether illegal immigrant drivers might be safer drivers if they passed a driving test - or whether it benefits the community more to "punish" them by refusing them driving licences.

Now, although I often agree with you Dianavan, you need to address the facts on religious and cultural clams for "special consideration". You do not serve the cause of tolerance (with which I generally agree) by a knee-jerk demand for Harvard references for reports of instances.

Hoewver, in the UK, there is quite a row currently going on between on the one hand womens rights groups and one government department, and on the other hand, race rights groups, and state schools (controlled by another government department).

A range of goverment posters, produced with campaigners against forced marriages, are intended for display in schools. Schools refuse to display them as potentially culturally offensive.

It is now being asserted by the leader of the relevant womens rights group (herself a woman from the ethnic and religious background in question) that even when girls DO manage to read the posters and seek help from local goverment social services, and/or local government social services are otherwise alerted to the possibility of the need for interventions, staff (usually women) of the ethnic and religious background in question do refuse to help - for religious and cultural reasons.



Of course there are many reports of persons of religion refusing to assist with legal abortions, too.


Another current one (in the London evening papers on Monday night) is that despite government and hospital "bare to the elbow, and wash to the elbow" edicts for medical staff, in attempts to control c.diff and other superbug infections in hospitals, Muslim women are refusing orders to do this (and Islamic spokespersons are supporting them) because they say that their religion forbids them to bare more than their hands in public.


Jack Straw got a lot of religious flak for insisting that his constituents should (even in the presence of chaperones) bare their faces when talking to him in constituency surgeries. He is partly deaf and says he finds seeing people's faces enables him better to appreciate the things being told to him by his constituents.


Some religious groups object to passport officers seeing the faces of women at passport control.


We have recently discussed here teh objection of the Hare Krishna group objecting to animal welfare officers intervening to put down a cow suffering greatly at the Hare Krishna temple in Aldenham.


There was the very well docuemnted Sikh objection to crash helmets: it lead to an incipient raceriot in Gravesend. Sikhs marched on the police station and the local superintendent has recently been publicly discussing the decision he had to take whether to deploy armed officers to restore order.


I certainly worry about whether kosher and Halal slaughter practices are as humane as those (bad enough) normally otherwise required in the UK.

The Polish Roman Catholic church has recenly been arguing for an exemption for proests from the proposed "zero tolerance" blood alcohol level for drivers in Poland - saying it will handicap priests in giving communion.