get your faith away from my prescription

[piranha]

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.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I think this is where we Jews have the benefit of being used to being a minority. A truly strict Orthodox Jew can't even gain benefit from selling a mixture of meat and milk, so does have a moral obligation to refuse to sell cheeseburgers to people. But, because we've been a minority for so long, we pretty much figure that that means that it's our job to not work at McDonald's.

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.