A group not clever enough to invent a memorable acronym, known simply as “We Really don’t like Firefighters and Medics,” is suing the city and state for the right to not pay taxes for fire and EMS coverage. They claim it violates their religious belief that life is meant to end at a specific point and fire and EMS intervention puts spirits of the saved in jeopardy.
They even have bumper stickers and T-shirts sporting the phrase: “My god hates firefighters.”
The group says it is fine paying taxes for street paving, dog catching and tree planting; it’s just fire and EMS it finds objectionable — on religious grounds.
This is, of course, a ridiculous, made-up story. I have no knowledge that such a group exists. At least I hope it doesn’t. If it did, we’d all be outraged and rightly so.
And we should be equally outraged that firefighters are suing the former mayor and fire chief in a Rhode Island city because they were told to drive a fire truck in a gay-pride parade. They followed the orders, and later sued that those orders violated their religious freedom.
The case has made its way to the state’s Supreme Court.
The mayor maintains that fire trucks are used in a variety of other parades and the gay community deserves the same access to them for its parade.
And, he’s right. Every law-abiding segment of the community should have equal access to something as simple as a fire truck for a parade or to a team of fire trucks during a building fire. We don’t pick and choose who gets attention in an emergency, nor should we in non-emergencies.
The firefighters maintain that they tried to change shifts to not work the gay-pride parade, but that request was denied.
And this gets to the core of the issue. As firefighters, we are public servants. Our role is to serve the public, no matter the public and no matter the service.
It is no great revelation to say that as a society we’ve become divided and deepened our trenches on both sides. Whether the heavily partisan government, talk radio or 24-hour news networks are the cause or result of this divide, who can say?
But, because we are public servants, we have to be better than that. We cannot forget that one of the pillars of American freedom is the right to pursue happiness.
Individuals’ views of that happiness may fall far outside our view of it — to the point where it makes us uneasy. But as public servants, our duty is to recognize those prejudices, set them aside and do our job.
Who knows, perhaps doing so will lead to tolerance, then to understanding and eventually acceptance. At the very least, it will show the public that we serve all of the public, equally.
