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yesterday i read about a pharmacist at a missouri target refusing to fill a prescription for emergency contraception. contrary to
king_tirian, my boycott of target until they stop weaseling, and state a corporate policy of resisting faith-based customer service wouldn't do much good; there is no target around here, and i am not currently visiting the US.
while looking into this case, i've also learned that the USA's largest pharmacy chain, CVS, has instituted a policy allowing its pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions on the basis of "deeply held personal beliefs" (which i just bet is code for "fundamentalist christian beliefs").
this is wrong. here's a suggestion for people whose deeply held personal beliefs seem to extend to pushing them on other people when they're in need of medication: get another job. surely the pro-life movement would love to have you work for them in some capacity. and to those companies who give such people the time of day because you don't want to alienate the fundies: just you wait until those of us who usually live and let live start to exert similar pressures.
it's ridiculous. would it be reasonable for a vegetarian to work at burger king and refuse to serve any customer who orders a whopper, or another meat-containing dish? the person would get fired faster than you could say "2 weeks notice". maybe a muslim worker at the 7-11 should have the right to refuse to sell you any fast food during daytime hours of ramadan? how about the orthodox jewish salesperson at sears who won't sell you anything on saturdays. would you like that? why should we make special exceptions for fundamentalist christians? why should their deeply held beliefs count for more?
a modern democracy should not just stand for freedom of religion, it should also stand for freedom from religion.
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while looking into this case, i've also learned that the USA's largest pharmacy chain, CVS, has instituted a policy allowing its pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions on the basis of "deeply held personal beliefs" (which i just bet is code for "fundamentalist christian beliefs").
this is wrong. here's a suggestion for people whose deeply held personal beliefs seem to extend to pushing them on other people when they're in need of medication: get another job. surely the pro-life movement would love to have you work for them in some capacity. and to those companies who give such people the time of day because you don't want to alienate the fundies: just you wait until those of us who usually live and let live start to exert similar pressures.
it's ridiculous. would it be reasonable for a vegetarian to work at burger king and refuse to serve any customer who orders a whopper, or another meat-containing dish? the person would get fired faster than you could say "2 weeks notice". maybe a muslim worker at the 7-11 should have the right to refuse to sell you any fast food during daytime hours of ramadan? how about the orthodox jewish salesperson at sears who won't sell you anything on saturdays. would you like that? why should we make special exceptions for fundamentalist christians? why should their deeply held beliefs count for more?
a modern democracy should not just stand for freedom of religion, it should also stand for freedom from religion.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 04:11 (UTC)*headdesk*
no subject
on 2005-10-22 06:54 (UTC)This might be one of those USA USA USA things, but I support the right of the individual to defy a corporate rule rather than silently taking off one's apron and leaving the career behind. Civil disobedience has a long and proud tradition here and it has probably brought us more liberty than repression when you add it all up. To give a specific example, gay marriage is on track to be declared legal in New York because a few court clerks decided to issue licenses in clear violation of precedent and the lawsuit to invalidate those licenses has been rejected at every step on the ladder.
So the existence of a pharmacist who doesn't believe in dispensing X, Y, or Z doesn't unduly alarm me (as long as they're not sneaking into the supply cabinet and replacing all the EC with Tic Tacs). My beef is with Eckerd and Target for having situations in which there are three pharmacists on duty and NONE of them feel like doing the job. Put one Scientologist pharmacist on the shift that doesn't mind dispensing contraceptives but won't touch the antidepressants and we don't have a crisis anymore.
To be geeky, if you are a businessowner who sticks that apothecary shingle outsite your store, you just published an interface and you need to guarantee that it is met. Moreover, I have the right to be spared the implementation details, *especially* if it is a kludge.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 07:10 (UTC)I'm at the point of having to renew my Costco membership to getmy prescriptions filled there (I've let it lapse since I don't really have the $50/year for it), since there's nowhere else locally without an explicit statement of support against such discrimination. I do need to see about the stances of some of the locally-owned pharmacies first, though, but if I can't, I'd rather pay the extra $50/year and know I'm supporting a company with reasonable policies (hell, they're not even progressive policies, it's a shame that we've been reduced to this point) than save it and shop somewhere more convenient.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 21:43 (UTC)if you are against birth control, by all means, don't take any. but refusing it to me isn't primarily about your rights, it's about mine.
i also appreciate the position of the business owner who might easily look at the logistics of accomodating all those different "deeply held personal beliefs" and feel overwhelmed (because you know once this becomes accepted, all sorts of deeply held beliefs are gonna come out of the woodwork). your idea breaks down as soon as somebody on that perfectly balanced shift gets sick suddenly. it breaks down for small businesses who only have one person on shift at a time. and how do you want to implement hiring people with this in mind? do you really want business owners to interview prospective employees about their religious beliefs? because without knowing, how can the perfect shift be planned? and once you allow that, would you think it's ok to refuse to hire somebody based on those beliefs? i don't know that i see more liberty coming towards us with that approach. i think we're quite well off with hiring decisions being made without grilling us on private matters (which religion is to me).
(yes, i knew the CVS story was a year+ old, but nothing popped up contradicting it, though my search terms might have been too narrow. thanks for the pointer; i'll look into it more deeply.)
no subject
on 2005-10-22 23:28 (UTC)I think that we should deal with breakdowns in the same sort of way that we do with similar sorts of things. If someone drops the F-bomb on broadcast radio without bleeping, then there is an FCC invesigation and a fine. I can see the same sort of thing happening for an errant pharmacy, except that it would be the FTC. Line up enough $2000 fines and Target will figure out how to recruit some of its scientifically-based pharmacists to move to the heartland and fill the key shifts.
How to deal with interviewing people about their beliefs? Here I think that it's valuable to having some sort of formal system like the conscientious objector status that I mentioned in my journal. Then an employer can hire and compensate an employee based not on what they beleive but on the level of utility that they pledge to offer the team. It doesn't seem much different from a software engineer who says in an interview that they categorically won't work nights and weekends or won't travel.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 04:28 (UTC)An Orthodox Jew cannot work on Saturdays.
Now, frankly, I feel that in a fair society, most jobs should be flexible enough to allow someone to have a work schedule that doesn't include Saturdays, or have some meal flexibility so that, during one month of the year, you can get your meal break REALLY close to sunset, and so forth.
Here's the thing: a Muslim worker really doesn't give a shit if YOU eat during Ramadan. An Orthodox Jew couldn't give a flying fuck if YOU'RE shopping on Saturday.
Somehow, it's only the Fundamentalist Christians who give a shit what YOU'RE doing with YOU'RE medications.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 04:51 (UTC)i know. that's why zie wasn't selling anything. :) sorry. it wasn't the best example. i should have come up with a kashrut one instead.
and while i sometimes feel like your last paragraph is true, i sure don't want to live under fundamentalist muslim rule either.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 05:57 (UTC)Of course, historically, when you look at places where Jews were a majority, you do start to find shit quite analagous to this stuff -- Jews beating people up for the temerity of asking for a cheeseburger or some such thing like that. Okay, maybe not that specifically, but same kind of thing.
no subject
on 2005-10-22 14:48 (UTC)applause
I wish I had more time to address this, but I believe this is the greatest danger facing the USA. I live in a part of the country that is saturated with bible blindness, and it scares me. It scares me more than bird flu, terrorism, and global warming.
And what is even more frightening is how normally sensible people get sucked into it. Right here, in his reply King Tirian says he thinks a pharmacist SHOULD have the right to refuse to fill a prescription. Of course, he weasels it by saying there should be another pharmacist on duty to fill the prescription, but he still sees nothing wrong in allowing a complete stranger to force his personally held religious views into my personal medical decisions. KMD argues on ssm recently that a deity-neutral environment in a science classroom promotes atheism and shouldn't be allowed.
It's insanity. How do you counter insanity?
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on 2005-10-22 20:42 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-10-22 23:39 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-10-24 17:27 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-10-22 21:47 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-10-22 22:17 (UTC)no subject
on 2005-10-24 03:55 (UTC)In both cases, the corporation is making a choice to honor the requirements of a specific religion -- the chicken place rather more blatantly than the drugstore, but similar. Except that the chain store is being very up-front and clear about the fact that it is doing this based on the views of one particular religion, and there's none of this "they're not really treating all religions equally" and "the store isn't doing it all the time" sort of conceptual fog that is obscuring the issue with the drugstores.
I don't think it's the government's place to say that it is not ok for a chicken-sandwich place -- or even a whole chain of hundreds of chicken-sandwich places -- to close on Sundays for religious reasons.
I want to see a reasonable consideration of what makes drugstores different from chicken-sandwich places before I'm willing to claim that it's the government's place to dictate what services a drugstore must provide.
no subject
on 2005-10-24 04:23 (UTC)the more important part to me is that people can manage their lives just fine without chik-fil-a. doing so without a specific medication is quite another thing.
my inflammatory reply to your last patagraph is that it's the government's place to dictate what services a drugstore must provide because otherwise blacks would still not be allowed to stand next to whites at that same drugstore, i bet. too many smallminded bigots have made life miserable in small towns for too many people who were different, for me to leave this sort of thing up to their magnanimity. if they want to get a business license, they ought to damn well provide all the legal services that can be provided.
no subject
on 2005-10-24 04:58 (UTC)The main reason for my last paragraph was not to say that there were no such reasons, merely that I hadn't thought of any that convinced me. Yours is definitely part of one, I think -- though "all the legal services that can be provided" is (obviously) absurd if one doesn't put a category-limit on it, and I'm not completely sure where the category limits ought to fall. For instance, is it appropriate for a drugstore to say, "we don't carry that drug because we only have room to stock the thousand most common ones"? Is there a standard complete list of drugs that most drugstores carry, that would form a reasonable basis for a requirement? (What if they happen to run out of something? I know drugstores do that on occasion, and while it's a difference of intent, it's not a difference in effect, and it's hard to legislate differences of intent rather than effect.)
I do think it's quite reasonable to legislate that a drugstore or chicken sandwich place cannot discriminate on whom it chooses to serve, though, and must provide the same services to everyone. (With said legislation likely needing reasonable exemptions to allow shopkeepers to tell genuinely obnoxious people to get out of their store, without their having to fill out paperwork documenting the obnoxiousness.) And for the cases where it is specific discrimination such as only providing birth control medication to married people, I think it's fairly clearly wrong.
State law rules pharmacies...
on 2005-10-24 17:40 (UTC)http://www.ncsl.org/programs/health/conscienceclauses.htm
I'm glad that in Illinois we have a law requiring pharmacies to fill legal prescriptions.
As for targeting specific stores, if their policy is designed to comply with state law, then I would not feel comfortable blaming the stores. The bigger fight will have to happen on the state level. I just wish I was more optimistic about the outcome.