Conscience at the Cash Register

Another skirmish in the conscience wars: some Muslim cashiers at Target are refusing to handle pork.  I think that this is a front-page story only because of recent controversies involving pharmacists, taxi drivers, and bus drivers.  The remedy here is simple -- as with underage cashiers faced with a customer purchasing alcohol, the cashier who cannot handle pork in good conscience can call over another cashier, or in the unlikely event that no other cashiers are on duty, ask the customer to scan the pork and place it in the grocery bag.  (It is more of a burden to ensure that more than one pharmacist is on duty, and customers obviously cannot help themselves to prescriptions.)  My general approach in this area is to allow employers some latitude to craft a conscience policy that keeps with their own institutional mission.  This example, though, shows the limits of that approach.  Unlike a pro-choice or pro-life pharmacy, it would be hard to discern an institutional mission that rises or falls on the requirement that cashiers handle all products.  The available accommodation is so easy that it would be reasonable, in my view, to infer that the employer simply did not want to be inconvenienced, not that it was pursuing a particular moral identity.