TORONTO (RNS) Members of a small Hutterite colony in the Canadian province of Alberta say they will flout the law rather than submit to being photographed for their driver’s licenses.
Residents of the Three Hills Hutterite Colony, northeast of Calgary, believe that being photographed is a sin because it violates the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images.
Since 1974, Alberta Hutterites had been exempt from having their photographs appear on licenses. However, starting in 2003, the provincial government mandated that every driver — Hutterites included — would have to have their photograph entered into a central database.
Alberta offered to let Hutterite drivers continue to use special licenses without photos, but said they had to be photographed for inclusion in its security database. The Hutterites refused, and two lower courts agreed that their religious beliefs were being violated.
But last summer, Canada’s Supreme Court sided with the province, upholding provincial rules making a digital photo mandatory for all new licenses.
Colony members were issued interim, photo-less licenses pending the high court’s judgment, but those are about to expire.
“We’ll have to drive without a license. That’s the plan right now,” Sam Wurz, colony manager of the Three Hills Hutterite Colony, told the Edmonton Journal. “Our religion is more important — just to obey God’s commands and rule and regulations more than man.”
The colony has roughly 100 members, including 20 who drive.
“We even pray for our government every evening in our church,” Wurz told CBC News. “But if the government puts a yoke on your neck and wants more than our religion will allow us to do, then we have to obey God more than man, and if they lock us up in jail I guess we’ll be locked up in jail.”
The Alberta government says it is open to suggestions from colony leaders on how to accommodate them, but so far, “none of the ideas they brought forward meets the requirements for an Alberta driver’s license,” a government spokesman said.