About a month ago, I saw a video about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s view that parts of Sharia law should be legally recognized by the UK’s government and just a few days ago, I read an article titled “Animal-sacrifice case highlights tensions over religious practices” both of which I came across on Pharyngula.
I completely agree that religious adherents should not be given exceptions to the law for religious reasons. If I can’t kill an animal just because I feel like it, a follower of Santería shouldn’t be able to kill one either. The person mentioned in the article on the First Amendment Center’s website, however, appears to disagree. He gave the police who arrested him a copy of a 1993 ruling by the Supreme Court, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, in which the Supreme Court ruled the law that prevented members of the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye from sacrificing animals was unconstitutional. This Supreme Court decision does not necessarily let the Santería adherent off the hook, however. In that case, if in fact the City of Hialeah created the law in an attempt to stifle the ability of this religious group to practice their faith, the Supreme Court did the right thing as the law would be a violation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. However, if, in this newer case, the law exists for merely secular reasons and was not created to prevent Santería adherents from sacrificing animals, then, even if it does limit the group’s ability to sacrifice animals, the person who was arrested for violating the law should lose if the case.
If the government unduly gives people the right to violate laws just because the laws prevent them from their religious practices, they are essentially giving people the right to do anything they want under the condition that they claim it’s for religious reasons. I could go torture random non-human animals I find around town and say it’s because my religion commands me to torture them, and then claim the government can’t punish me or else they would be violating my right to exercise my religious beliefs. As long as the government isn’t targeting me for doing that (not that I actually do that; it’s just an example 
) because the religion I made up on the spot says I need to, I shouldn’t be justified in breaking the law.
And don’t forget peyote.
Did you see the hubbub about religious exclusions in practicing a profession with respect to Muslim cab drivers not wanting to transport people carrying alcohol, pharmacists not dispensing prescribed birth control pills, pharmacists not filling prescriptions for HIV+ people, doctors not prescribing ED drugs (ex. Viagra) for unmarried or gay men, or Muslim women doctors not scrubbing their arms before medical procedures, because the religious tradition of women not being able to bare their arms trumps the idea of cleanliness in a medical setting?
And those are just the fields of personal transportation and medicine.
I’m conflicted between the idea of promoting tolerance or acceptance of other people’s ideas and combating injustice and idiocy.
If the government wants to make something legal because some religious people “need” to do it for some sort of ritual or something, in general, that’s fine or at least acceptable. However, I can’t think of any circumstance in which it is acceptable to make something legal if you’re doing it because you adhere to a certain belief system. That’s unfair to those who don’t believe whatever crazy stuff those other people believe. If I want peyote for some reason, I shouldn’t have to believe anything in particular.