| responding to comments i made months and months ago |
[Mar. 26th, 2007|01:10 am] |
I have very, very strong opinions about pharmacists who refuse to sell birth control medication and the reprehensible employers and lawmakers who tolerate or empower them. In fact, I stand by my belief that they should be immediately fired from their job and their license revoked - indeed, I'd go so far as to say that this is the only acceptable response.
Beyond the issue of access to birth control, for me the idea of "conscience clauses" is something that seems absurd at best and dangerous at worst, from the EMT who refuses to treat a transsexual patient to the Muslim taxi driver who refuses to transport passengers carrying alcohol in their luggage to the vegan grocery clerk who refuses to sell dairy products or meats to customers. Recently over at TBogg the hypocrisy of this pundit for supporting someone who refused to sell the morning-after pill but being outraged at Muslim clerks declining to sell pork products was pointed out, and this comment from D. Sidhe got my attention, since it phrased what I had to say on the topic in this blog better than I did:
One of the things I scream about on a regular basis is the fact that it's often easier to *get* a job than it is to *do* one, and so people have a tendency to take the best job they can get, despite knowing they are not qualified to do it. Whether your lack of qualifications comes from not knowing the requisite programming language, an unwillingness to teach evolution to your students, or a fundamental incompetence, is really besides the point for me. If you take a job, you need to be prepared to do it. Otherwise, find a new job.
Particularly in situations like this, we would otherwise end up with a world where any given errand takes hours because the cab driver doesn't like going past your gay neighbors, the doctor refuses to deal with people with contagious diseases, the pharmacist thinks you should be praying away your fever, the cashier is unwilling to sell you food because he thinks you should starve a flu, and right back to the cab driver who, this time, objects to the immorality of your clothing.
Can you chase around and find people who don't have those objections? Probably. But they probably have other ones, and nobody's color coded to tell you what theirs are.
The solution that I'm sure a lot of people would endorse would be to say that, well, it should be okay to refuse to do something that kills someone. In which case, nobody's buying any cigarettes ever again, nor Twinkies. Because those kill real live humans, not just clumps of fetal tissue, and there is a lot of evidence that they do, rather than just some take-it-or-leave-it pronouncement from a deity.
So maybe the solution is to privilige religious consciences but not those of the vegan or the feminist. But why? Religion is also, for the record, a lifestyle choice that, in fact, an awful lot of people who don't share yours feel sure will send you to hell. So what's special about it? And why should we be picking and choosing between the religions and the moralisms that we'll let people enforce on others?
Is it public harm? I can make a pretty good case that someone's purchase of a sweatshop produced pair of shoes harms people a great deal more than their purchase of the morning after pill.
So we either have to let everyone enforce their conscience, and society breaks down, or we tell people to do their jobs on their employer's time and witness on their own. And that should go straight across the board with no funny little gerrymandered districts for people who think birth control is "abortion in a bottle", or who feel that teaching the approved courses on evolution will lead to school shootings, or librarians who think that books on how to stop being gay will ruin your life.
And, to go back to our righteous pharmacists, what stops them from simply leaving their jobs in protest? It's fascinating how the strength of their convictions dissipates at the precise point where their willingness to stand up for their beliefs stops being convenient for them. |
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I just wish there were words strong enough to describe people who are cowardly enough to hide their anti-birth control beliefs behind this bullshit rhetoric about conscience clauses.
I came across a related situation at work a few weeks ago. We had a markdown table of books that hadn't sold in ages, and there was a book amongst them all that was art photography of nude pre-pubescent boys and girls. A customer found it and started complaining to one of our managers, asking how we could dare sell such an item. I couldn't fathom how he didn't understand that since that was a legally produced book, it was not our job to decide not to sell it or not. If everyone that offended anyone was taken off the shelves, there'd be nothing left.
I really do find that attitude kind of creepy. It's just a few steps away from an authoritarian outlook, where any institution that promises to police society must be embraced.
These days it doesn't seem enough for people to have a belief system. They have to ram that belief system down everyone else's throat. Which leads me to think they're terrified of any person or any thing that might cast even the slightest doubt on that belief system.
It's kind of worrying, because at times it seems like those people who want to see the United States become a bona fide theocracy are getting more and more mainstream. Like in the Soviet Union, it seems that there are many people, quite a few of them in the media mainstream, who believe everything is part of an ideological struggle.
It's even more worrying that the religious lunacy is spreading outside the US. We now have our own fundamentalist nutters in Australia, who model themselves on American Christian nutters, and their influence is growing. Our current prime minister is very much under their influence (although he's such a cynical and dishonest political operator it's hard to tell how much he really believes and how much is political calculation). And there'sd a growing suspicion that the religious loons in Australia are being financed by American religious loons.
I've also read that they're attempting to establish a beachhead in Canada, especially after - horror of horrors - they decided homosexual couples are as deserving of social recognition as heterosexuals. Does no populace in the English-speaking world have the power to tell them to fuck off (as we know the French and the Spanish surely would)?
Does no populace in the English-speaking world have the power to tell them to fuck off
Sadly, it seems not.
I know this is an old joke now, but this sort of thing really does still make me want to become a pharmacist so I can refuse to give out Viagra.
You can do it in the guise of the Puritan Pharmacist. "You want this medication to...to help you enjoy procreational activities? Disgraceful!"
I've always wanted to unleash on supporters of anti-birth control pharmacists the Christian Scientist Pharmacist, who fills every prescription with a prayer book.
Ok, from a civil liberties point of view, we have to have a strong distinction between "should" from an ethical standpoint and "should" from a legal standpoint.
Private businesses have the right to purvey (or not) whatever legal goods or services they wish, and we have the right to buy them or not. The accommodation of the consciences of employees under those circumstances is up to the employer, and the right of offended patrons to boycott or protest those businesss in response is up to those patrons. If the employers are losing too much money from it, chances are they'll fire said employees or reassign them or whatever since business people tend to be business people first and, frankly, moral and/or ethical billboards second (if that).
It gets stickier when we get to the medical community, but in our infinite wisdom, we have decided to leave medicine up to the free market instead of having a system that makes sense, so from a legal standpoint, there ain't much we can do aside from the above boycotts/protests unless the "act of conscience" is a clear violation of another's rights, eg. a member of the Aryan nation refusing to serve a black family because it's against his "religion."
When it comes to that which is sponsored and/or run by the government, the "should" becomes quite a bit more probably one you could take to court under, at least, the equal protections clause.
And really, how much power do we want to exercise over others' "acts of conscience" no matter how much we disagree with them? Because the answer to that question will determine how much power we want exercised over ours. | |
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