Ontario to exempt Sikhs from wearing helmets while riding motorcycles
insurancebusinessmag.com
insurancebusinessmag.com
Then scrap the helmet law for everyone.
Why do people driving 3 wheeled cars that have roll cages and seat belts need helmets but religious people do no? Makes no sense to me.
Sure, if they crash they're more likely to get a head injury that the public purse has to pay for. But that theoretical amount is probably tiny compared to all the dumb stuff everyone else in the country is doing that contributes towards healthcare costs.
Laws and state support are both about finding the impossible balance between control, freedom, responsibility and cost.
Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They're not necessary, they're just a very good idea. So good, in fact, that a lot of states make them compulsory when riding a motorbike.
But sometimes states decide that, even if they are a good idea, there are other things that take precedence. Even if that other thing is net detrimental to public health.
You can disagree with the decision. I happen to not think that religious rights should trump public health. But it's entirely reasonable to make exemptions when there is a conflict of priority.
And, in this case, there's probably enough evidence from other states that have this exemption to make a reasoned public health choice. The UK have had it since the 70s, for example.
What is reasonable is for the religious to make completely acceptable exemptions while performing certain tasks, like biking, for their own safety, and that of the the public, not to mention tax dollars saved in the treatment of accidents from those disobeying common sense laws like helmets.
I think you may be confusing Western society with the US. It's not a tenet, fundamental or otherwise, of many Western societies.
But otherwise, I would tend to agree with you. Some people don't. But I don't have a serious objection to the decision even though I wouldn't have made it myself.
Jesse Ventura, Barney Frank, Pete Stark, and Jared Huffman, among others, would seem to refute this. I mean, I assume Governor's offices and the House of Representatives qualify as “meaningful public office”.
No, that's just over the last 20 (no plus) years; each of the identified people has been elected to Congress or a Governor's office in 1998 or later.
It's true that the preceding 200+ years of US history had a substantially lower (but nonzero, even in comparable offices) average frequency of publicly non-religious office holders, but that's about how the US was not how it is.
It's a fairly common element of Western societies, though the particular expression varies; ranging from broad tolerance despite a formally established religion through a firm secularism in the public square; the US, though it professes a reasonably strong though not extreme form that amounts to neutrality actually has fairly weak separation between privileged religious communities and government power in practice.
If there really is a cost to it (e.g. the government needs to clean up dead people), then make it opt-out with a fee when you get your license. When you get pulled over for an infraction, you can get an additional fine if you aren't wearing a helmet and haven't paid the fee, where to fine is much larger than the fee.
The government shouldn't protect people from themselves (though it can certainly nudge them through opt-out strategies), it just needs to protect people from each other. That's why we have people locked up for marijuana possession and other victimless crimes.
Religion shouldn't be relevant at all to this. If you choose to opt out of something for any reason, you're reasonable for taking measures to get you same result.
The fabled separation of church and state was proposed for this exact thing - equal application of the law regardless of religion.
My quick googling (eg http://www.religioustolerance.org/sep_cs_can.htm ) says that Canada has no equivalent to the "Establishment Clause" in the US constitution, and also doesn't have a strict separation.
However I think the legislation should be on the helmet and other safety industries to ensure production of some safety device for people to wear that fairly accommodates their needs. This isn't just a bigger helmet, and likely needs investment in safety organisations to research what works.
The law requirement for helmets is one meant to protect people, same with safety with seatbelts or even more specific ones in other industries.
As a motorcyclist, cyclist and driver, I'd like to see more inclusion in law, rather than these sorts of exceptions. We have a responsibility to properly accommodate someone else's specific needs, but also ensure their safety.
You're not ensuring their safety by forcing them to wear helmets. Some statistics for bi-cyclists show that helmet-wearers take greater risk, effectively increasing their risk of injury or death. We don't have similar data for motorcycles, it may well be a different tradeoff.
I disagree with the premise that we need to make such decisions for people. If we really followed through with this safety ideal, we should ban all two-wheelers, they're the riskiest way to take part in traffic.
You _may not be_ ensuring. The data for cyclists may very well not extrapolate to motorcyclists.
> I disagree with the premise that we need to make such decisions for people
Interesting! I think ensuring citizen safety _is_ something the state should be (in part) responsible for, and history has shown that people are often too ignorant of the risks to do it through education alone. Do you also disagree with regulation requiring seatbelts?
Eliminating all risk is unrealistic.
If you're blind, you aren't allowed to drive a car. If you can't wear a helmet then why should you be allowed to ride without one?
I'm all for inclusion and respecting others' practices, but this is short-sighted.
Your argument seems to be cost to "the public insurer", but I don't think that's a clear cut way to save money, it really depends on the insurance. For health/disability insurance, fatalities will be cheaper than a crippling injury over a lifetime, so from a cost perspective, it may well be best to optimize for lowest survival rate.
They can however easily fall off even before the person makes contact with the ground.
If your only options to avoid a ticket are a turban or a motorcycle helmet, I think the rational choice for a non-Sikh is the motorcycle helmet. "Gaming the system" doesn't quite work in this situation.