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

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about this one. It seems wrong to me to say that someone with those views should not be able to work at a store for whom emergency contraception must be a very small part of its sales. It would be a different matter if they took a job in a family planning clinic, where it would be a far larger part of their daily routine. Similarly, it would be ridiculous for a doctor with similar views to take a job in an abortion clinic and then refuse to carry out abortions, but I do support the right of doctors who choose a more general practice to refuse to carry them out (this sometimes becomes an issue because some training hospitals insist that all trainee doctors should carry out abortions as a mandatory part of training, even if they have no intention of doing so after qualification). I think the right solution is for the pharmacist to refer the patient to a colleague and for the store to have the responsibility of making sure the prescription gets filled, just as I think that Orthodox Jews should have a legally-protected right not to work on Shabbat (ideally, I would deal with this by allowing everyone, religious or not, to nominate any 24-hour period in the week when they would be guaranteed time off) and it should be up to the store to ensure that they hire sufficient Christians, Muslims, atheists or whatever to enable them to open on Saturdays.

[brooksmoses]

My take on the issue is that I don't see where it is necessarily different than, say, the Chik-Fil-A (or however it's proplerly misspelled) chicken-sandwich fast-food restaurants that are all over the U.S. southeast, and which are not open on Sundays for religious reasons.

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.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

they're closed for everyone. i don't have much of a problem with that (though i do have some, and, like liz, i think individual employees ought to have a choice of which 24-hour period they want to take off instead of being forced into the majority religion's day of rest. i do realise that i places where said majority religion is seriously practiced by many people, a store might not gain enough by being open on that day of rest). i am, in general, against elevating sunday over other days of the week, and i am glad the government stopped mandating closure on sundays.

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.

[brooksmoses]

I agree -- mostly. (For what it's worth, Chik-Fil-A is definitely not in the "not gaining enough by being open on Sundays" category -- though there is an interesting sidetrack down the fact that they might well be in a position of either having to either close on Sunday or else have people working on Sunday who would prefer not to for religious reasons but don't feel they can afford not to, simply because if one takes the "prefer not to for religious reasons" people out, there aren't enough left to mind the store.)

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.