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Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

> If helmets are in fact necessary

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.

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I don't buy the "public health" argument. I can see "public health" for things like vaccines where one person's choices can significantly affect others, but how does someone dying by making a stupid decision impact the public?

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.

It isn't reasonable to make compromises on public health for religion. In fact, the separation of church and state as a fundamental tenet of Western society was implemented for this exact thing.

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.

> the separation of church and state as a fundamental tenet of Western society

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.

It's not even a real tenet in the US. Politics and national/state/local policies here have extremely heavy religious overtones. There is absolutely no way that a publicly non-religious person would be elected to any meaningful public office.

> There is absolutely no way that a publicly non-religious person would be elected to any meaningful public office.

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”.

~4 people over the past 200+ years is not a meaningful demonstration of any tolerance towards non-religious folks holding public office.

> ~4 people over the past 200+ years

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.

> I think you may be confusing Western society with the US. It's not a tenet, fundamental or otherwise, of many Western societies

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.

Ontario funds a Catholic school board with public money. Separation of church and state is not at all universal.

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