MORE religious madness in the US – “Faith-based” pharmacies where condoms, birth control pills or emergency contraceptives are strictly verboten, are spreading like a virus.
And a nasty one at that!
Egged on by the Vatican’s fascist dictator, more and more pharmacists are vigorously exercising a “right of conscience” to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable – thus making a complete mockery of their profession.
In his recent address to the 25th International Congress of Catholic Pharmacists Pope Benedict XVI said:
Pharmacists must seek to raise people’s awareness so that all human beings are protected from conception to natural death, and so that medicines truly play a therapeutic role …
In other word, screw customers’ needs.
The Pope also said that they have an educational role toward patients, so that drugs are used in a morally and ethically correct way.
We cannot anaesthetise consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person’s life.
Now, according to Worldwide Religious News, the US is seeing a growing number of drugstores around the country setting up as “pro-life” businesses – a term that insultingly suggests that conventional ones are “anti-life”. What a bloody cheek!
Said Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Society, a Chicago public-interest law firm that is defending a pharmacist who was fined and reprimanded for refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills:
The United States was founded on the idea that people act on their conscience – that they have a sense of right and wrong and do what they think is right and moral. Every pharmacist has the right to do the same thing.
But critics insist that the stores could create dangerous obstacles for women seeking legal, safe and widely used birth control methods.
Said Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington advocacy group:
I’m very, very troubled by this. Contraception is essential for women’s health. A pharmacy like this is walling off an essential part of health care. That could endanger women’s health.
The pharmacies are emerging at a time when a variety of health-care workers are refusing to perform medical procedures they find objectionable. Fertility doctors have refused to inseminate gay women. Ambulance drivers have refused to transport patients for abortions. And anaesthesiologists have refused to assist in sterilisations.
Which begs the question, why don’t these morons find other occupations? We suggest they enrol as Theory of Gravity testers, jump off high cliffs without a parachute and make ‘faith-based” landings –preferably on their heads.
The most common, widely publicised conflicts have involved pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills, morning-after pills and other forms of contraception. They say they believe that such methods can cause what amounts to an abortion and that the contraceptives promote promiscuity, divorce, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and other societal woes.
The result has been confrontations that have left women traumatised and resulted in pharmacists being fired, fined or reprimanded.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
June 19th, 2008 at 1:22 am
I’d like to see what these whackjobs would do if vegetarian cashiers would refuse to sell them meat, or atheist booksellers would refuse to sell them Bibles and other religious books. If they think it’s OK for them to refuse to dispense/sell certain things because they object to them then what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Let’s all start refusing to do our jobs based on our personal preferences. Of course if any of us still had jobs it’s likely little work would get done, but at least we wouldn’t have our delicate sensibilities offended.
I tell you, people really get my goat.
June 19th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
As much as I disagree with the practice and think it is a poor decision to turn, I must say that a privately owned pharmacy should be able to turn away customers for whatever reason they see fit. No one said they had to make good decisions.
If these pharmacists and medical workers are going against their company’s policies, they should be fired. Period.
June 19th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
oops… I seemed to have gotten distracted…
“…think it is a poor decision to turn…” away customers for these reasons,
June 20th, 2008 at 3:28 am
that’s bullshit. not ALL women take birth control pills for contraceptive purposes…many women, like myself, take it because it prevents ovarian cysts [which can interfere with fertility] or because their periods are literally debilitating. to deny these women what the need…is appalling. i’d love to rail on them personally for being so retarded.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Imagine the fuss if an atheist pharmacist refused life-saving drugs to an evangelical on the grounds that perpetuating Christianity is a danger to public health …..
…not that I’m suggesting anyone should!
Just whatever you do, don’t say anything to them that they could rephrase as ‘go forth and multiply’.
They might do it and we’d picking up the cost in tax exemption for another generation.