Christians tend to not have special dietary requirements, especially protestants. Jews and Muslims do. So the groups that are historically already discriminated against are discriminated against in prison too if you take away their right to access to those requirements. You’re (not you, of course, but society) doubly discriminating against them in a society that has never been friendly to them.
Yes. And taking away what little rights some have is only going to make that worse.
Yes. And people who have had a particular diet their entire lives should not be denied it.
If I may, I think that you are saying that the lack of religion should not be a reason to deny special food to some while religion itself is used as a reason to give special food to others. Atheists can have reasons to reject certain foods or insist on certain foods, and those reasons should be considered just as valid as religious reasons. You are not arguing for taking those rights away from religious people, but expanding those rights to non-religious people. Is that a correct understanding?
I bring this up only because I think that this is what you are saying, but I can also understand @anon61221983 's interpretation. If I am wrong, I will butt out.
Edit Note: By special, I mean only “other than standard prison fare.”
Then I think that you, @Skeptic and I are all saying the same thing: “Don’t deny people their dietary requirements, period.” It should not be a question of their faith. If their faith forbids them from eating pork, then don’t make them eat pork. If they don’t eat pork for non-religious reasons, then don’t make them eat pork.
I believe that he was just trying to say that religious faith shouldn’t be a necessity for having your dietary requirements met. I did not read his comment as, “We should also deny dietary requirements based on faith,” but rather, “We should also accept non-religious reasons for eating or not eating certain foods as valid.” (Though I can see how the construction of his sentence made it a bit easy to take that way.)
As a capital-A Atheist myself, I do understand that there is tension between wanting to protect people of minority faiths and opposing special treatment for religious people in general. I think some wires got crossed there.
I wouldn’t compare it to segregation because, unlike skin color, religion isn’t immediately obvious. I do, however, have very strong moral and philosophical beliefs that I arrived at on my own without a sky fairy writing about it thousands of years ago. I just wish my beliefs were given equal weight as religious beliefs.
I take a different view, using Jacob to force prisons to stop denying cultural and religious diets to prisoners. Let them eat what they want when they want, let them fast, and ideally let them feast (that one might be the hardest to get past the “the cruelty is the point” people). I don’t care if someone lies and thinks they are cheating the system. There are far worse things that they could do, this barely registers on the badness scale.
And for fuck sake get rid of nutraloaf. That shit is going to give people eating disorders.
I think what people fail to register here is that the people who get special treatment are generally not the ones who have special religious requests for their meals. Those are the people who are regularly denied those requests. And often the people denied requests are denied because of their race/ethnicity.
Looking at the history of prison practices that got us that law makes it far more understandable. Many prisons would go out of their way to only offer food that violated prisoner’s religious prohibitions. Prisoners would be beaten and put in solitary for engaging in prayer practices of minority faiths. Granting protection for religious practice prevents the much more disturbing use of state power to punish religious minorities.
All of that still happens, too. American prisons are full of such human rights violations, which we’re all pretty aware of, I’m sure and that we don’t need to go over here.
Pretending like religious people in prison asking for their dietary requirements is them asking some kind of unfair privilege ignores that history and ongoing violation of human rights. Like religion or not, denying people the ability to practice their religion is a violation of human rights (within reason, of course). People of faith who are not white Christians (and in some cases in the past, were not protestant, too) generally speaking are treated worse across American society, and that is doubly so in a situation like a prison, which is already full of horrific violations of human rights and even basic human decency.
What is infuriating about THIS case is not that someone (who has not even gone to court and been convicted) is asking for their food choices be respected - all people within the prison system should get that and it should not even be a question. It’s that this is yet another example of white men participating in a violent crime getting privileges that others do not get on a regular basis.
If we do it at Guantanamo for foreign terrorists going on hunger strikes, I don’t know why domestic terrorists ought be treated any differently. Whether the prison system should be rethought as a whole, including dietary accommodations across the board, does seem to be, really, an altogether different issue.
Working as designed, because it’s not really a prison system, not completely. The American per capita incarceration rate is so out of line with the rest of the western world that something else is going on.
I think the combination of low-level ethnic cleansing coupled with the for-profit private prison system pretty much does it (you may well have been implying as much).
I have been considering a new, three-step program.
Create a “fake”, but not-fake, organization. It would be a QAnon based aid program for the “oppressed and discriminated-against” adherents of all far-right causes; QAnon, White Supremacists, etc.
Reach out to nations run by far-right, pro-Trump fascist leaders, expressing the plight of such folks here in America, where they are unwanted and harrowed by our terrible Liberal Multiculturalism and baby-eating Leftist leadership. Leaders like that love to make big, bold statements, so they would be happy to open their arms and welcome American “political refugees.”
Exile every Trumpist, QAnon, Nazi asshole that would otherwise go to prison.
Yes, the USA has been the most imprisoning-of-its-own-people-per-capita for quite some time now, I think. When you think of things like "that means more than China, Russia, other totalitarian regimes, it really sets in (and makes me ill, to be sure).
Good ol’ Joe Biden’s crime bill certainly didn’t help, not to pick at that festering scab. I’m supporting the guy now, and Kamala Harris, but he was literally one of my very last picks out of the primary candidates. I just wanna see a major justice reform bill passed, stat, that does something meaningful to change the scenario.
Is engaging QAnon with guerrilla PSYOPS and counter-programming operations a thing? If so, how do I get involved, and if not, why not, and who’s in? I ask in all seriousness (of the community at large).
