Download this publication - PULP

138 Chapter 4
concerned with questions about individual and group access to the kind of
goods that enable us to lead lives worth living.
Thus, the hard question for the immediate purpose of this article is
this: When does religious discrimination constitute a justifiable
impairment of the dignity of some of our fellow South Africans? That, I
argued at the outset, was the question that we needed to answer: The
hypothetical scenario adumbrated in the introduction offers a better
opportunity – than Strydom does – to construct a cogent reply.
Before we answer the 'hard question', let us briefly rehearse the
philosophical foundations for the kind of 'constitutive liberalism' that I
have built up over the preceding pages. We began with the simple
proposition that 'meaning makes us' – as individuals and as communities
our social endowments largely determine who we are and what gives our
lives meaning. In turning to concerns about 'capture', we recognised that
freedom of religion, freedom of association and the right to communal
religious practice are meant to protect the various well-springs of meaning
that 'make us'. They do so by granting religious associations – amongst
other associations – the right to determine the rules of membership, voice,
exit that govern a community. At the same time, we recognised that
associations of various kinds – religious associations included – enable us
to create bridging and bonding networks that generate 'social capital'. This
social capital – predicated as it is on trust, respect and loyalty – allows us
to (a) maintain the practices and institutions that give our lives meaning;
(b) create new practices and institutions that lead, potentially, for even
greater flourishing; and (c) use these stores of real and figurative capital to
transform 'exclusive' practices and institutions into non-exclusive practices
and institutions that enable 'new' and perhaps 'historically disadvantaged
members' of our society to benefit from the various goods these institutions
distribute.
Given the above precepts of 'constitutive liberalism', it is easy to
conclude that golf clubs that have been the bastion of white male Christian
privilege must open their doors to persons of all colours, all sexes and all
religions. But what of religious secondary schools that discriminate on the
basis of an applicant's willingness to accept a prescribed religious
curriculum and, at the same time, offer a better education than that
generally available in our public schools? It would be foolish to dismantle
such institutions solely on the grounds that either some form of exclusion
takes place or that some re-inscription of privilege occurs. Almost all
meaningful human labour occurs within the context of self-perpetuating
social networks of various kinds. Taking a sledgehammer to social
institutions that create and maintain large stores of real and figurative
capital is a recipe for a very impoverished polity. The hard question thus
turns on the extent to which religious communities can engage in
justifiable forms of discrimination in the furtherance of constitutionally
legitimate ends and the extent to which the state and other social actors can