Charleston Baptist Church and its Pastor, the father of IC, have sent the Washington State Pharmaceutical Board a letter objecting to the removal of the "right of conscience" provision for pharmacists. Removal of this clause now compels pharmacists to fill prescriptions for abortions like the morning-after pill – something patients could easily fill somewhere else.
Charleston Baptist Church
Bremerton, Washington
December 20, 2010
Washington State Pharmaceutical Board
Dear Members:
The Friday, December 17th article in the Tacoma News Tribune informed us of your recent decision to remove the "right of conscience" provision from Washington State pharmacists. Previously, we understand, a pharmacist could refuse to dispense a pill if it violated his conscience to do so and another pharmacist within his pharmacy was available to dispense that pill. Unfortunately, your original policy did not cover a lone pharmacist who might need to exercise his "right of conscience." Now, your policy becomes even more draconian, forcing all pharmacists to dispense medications which might cause the destruction of human life.
We are disturbed that your Board seeks to over-regulate the pharmacies under your supervision. It is interesting that you insist that every drug imaginable be dispensed by every pharmacy and we are concerned that this over-regulation of the pharmacies is due to the influence of certain special interest groups, particularly the "women's right to choose" extremists who do not want their "right to an abortion" inhibited in any way. On the other hand, there seems to be no concern for the Christian pharmacists (and Christian community) who hold life to be sacred and do not want to participate in anything which would interfere with our inalienable, God-given right to life.
We are personally aware of young people who are pursuing a Pharmaceutical career , but are very concerned that they may have to dispense drugs which would violate their conscience.
One young lady we know is considering moving out of Washington State to a State where the laws governing the Pharmaceutical Industry are less restrictive.
Please reconsider your recent decision. It is not necessary in a practical sense: those wanting their "abortion" drugs will always have access to them. It is reprehensible in a moral sense: forcing pharmacists to go against their beliefs and value systems reminds one of the policies in communist countries, where no one cares about the individual, much less the unborn child.
Finally, your decision continues to erode away at one of our very basic freedoms. Sadly, as we watch many freedoms being stripped away in America, we realize that we will soon no longer be "the land of the brave and the free", the country that gives hope to people of many nations who daily live in fear of dictatorial governments.
Although abortion was made legal in America through "Roe vs. Wade", legal, like might, does not make right. Even the justices who voted in abortion did not intend to promote it; rather, it was to be the exception to the rule. Your current position on the "right of conscience" issue, concerning the dispensation of medications which may cause abortions, allows no exception to your rule; hence, you show an extreme bias in favor of those desiring abortions and a blatant disregard for those whose only desire is to not bloody their own hands by participating in something (selling abortion pills) which violates their conscience.
Sincerely,
Stephen E. Alexander, Pastor – Charleston Baptist Church
& 40 Congregational members Bremerton, WA
How far do conservatives really want to go in this area? Consider: should EMTs refuse to transport a patient if the result of getting the patient to a hospital might be an abortion? Should EMTs have the right of conscience to refuse their services to anyone whose conduct they regard as immoral?
As for pharmacists, I’m not sure if conservative moralists understand that birth control pills are often prescribed for other health conditions. One of my daughters needs them to help with extremely severe acne. I suppose that if she goes to a conservative pharmacist, he will refuse to fill her prescription because he believes she intends to engage in extramarital sex.
Conservatives love to set themselves up as arbiters of morality–I expect clergy and intellectuals to do this, but the harm they can do is minimal compared with that possible for moralizing health care providers.
In the interests of full disclosure, conservative pharmacists should post notices indicating the health issues for which they are willing, and those for which they are unwilling, to fill prescriptions. Other health care providers should start doing this as well. Then patients can know what they’re getting–or not getting–when they enter a provider’s waiting room. Then pharmacy schools and medical schools can start identifying themselves in terms of their ideological orientation, as well as indicating what sorts of students they will reject on ideological grounds.
What is going on here is spiritual rape in order to destroy the moral order and supplant it with license leading to slavery and the mechanization of all, who will then be used as spare parts satisfying the whims of the self appointed elites. It comes strait out of the bowels of hell.
Remember Soylent Green!
This type of evil can only be overcome by prayer and fasting.
EMTs transporting women to the trauma unit for an emergency life-saving abortion. Yes, that is one for the moral philosophers alright. Gripping in that it is so true to life.
One logical approach to that all-too-common moral dilemma might be employment contracts with mandatory participation in all types of medical transport clearly stipulated and no exemptions for religious or moral concerns. If only “you liberals” hadn’t made it illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of religion, huh? I know you of all people wouldn’t oppose Title VII like those conservative and libertarian bigots, racists, and homophobes do.
reply to Mr. Mulligan,
You write, dripping with sarcasm: “EMTs transporting women to the trauma unit for an emergency life-saving abortion. Yes, that is one for the moral philosophers alright. Gripping in that it is so true to life.”
You should have guessed that I’d call you on this. Consider:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2010/12/catholic-nun-bishop-abortion-health-reform/1
Where you will find: “a pregnant woman dying of pulmonary hypertension and too ill to transfer to another hospital, underwent a life-saving abortion” I know that conservatives often deny the reality of medical conditions for which abortion can be a life-saving procedure. I’ll bet you can direct me to a web site that debunks the whole idea.
reply to Luciano,
No, no, no: “Soylent Green” was not a documentary.
“How far do conservatives really want to go in this area?”
Not the correct question. It isn’t conservatives who are forcing their beliefs here. It is progressives, using the heavy hand of government, who are imposing their morality.
reply to Mountain man,
You write: “It isn’t conservatives who are forcing their beliefs here. It is progressives, using the heavy hand of government, who are imposing their morality.” The question of who is forcing whom all depends on which side you are on. If you are at all aware of the conservative moral and religious agenda, surely you can see that your side is equally involved in ‘imposing’ morality.
I never claimed that conservatives weren’t imposing their morality. Everybody imposes their morality. It is only progressives who won’t admit it, preferring to blow smoke about “judgmental” conservatives.
You will note that it is progressives who have advanced their agenda here, not conservatives. The real problem apparently is that some uppity conservatives piped up in opposition and have to be slapped down by the “tolerant” left.
Dissent used to be patriotic, remember?
reply to Mountain Man,
It is dishonest of progressives to deny that their political positions are based on their moral positions. I try not to commit that error.
Well done, sir. Your honesty is commendable.
You should have guessed that I’d call you on this.
There was no indication in the linked article that the woman who underwent the abortion was refused medical transport by fundamentalist Christian EMTs or left to die by extremist Catholic doctors who conscientiously objected to her treatment. That was, after all, the situation you set up and that I repeated. In point of fact, she had the procedure in a Catholic hospital. The story actually undermines your hyperbole about dying women being left at the scene of a car wreck because their Christian EMTs and doctors refuse to provide them treatment.
I know that conservatives often deny the reality of medical conditions for which abortion can be a life-saving procedure.
Yes, and it is well known that 99% of all 45 million abortions performed since 1973, including the 820,151 abortions performed in 2005, were life-saving procedures. I know that liberals only support abortion in cases of absolute medical necessity and not as a matter of reproductive control.
I notice you took care not to address the implications of Title VII on your desire to deny employment to medical personnel on the basis of their religious objection to particular medical procedures. It seems, as usual, that in liberal land some animals are more equal than others.
Gestelle you need to get a life…no really.
Let’s analyze this. You get to spew words to defend the practice of killing but aborted children have no voice. Please remember that the only people that can argue about this have been born.
Let’s bring it home…maybe your mother wanted a day after pill and she went to a pharmacist who told her no I can’t because of my beliefs and hence you were born…where is your argument now? That pharmacist saved your life…
Does it not bother you that we save a small fish or a small rodent to the detriment of local economies but we cannot agree to save a single life?
How do you sleep at night knowing your life was not taken by an abortion but YOU personally advocate killing children.
reply to Mr. Mulligan,
You absolutely miss my point in referring you to the Catholic hospital story. The EMTs (or whoever did transport)and the hospital did NOT make their decisions based on any opposition to abortion any of the personnel involved might have had. In conservative land, where such personnel would have the right of conscience to reject transport or medical assistance, the result for the patient might have been quite different.
Note that Catholic authorities forced the hospital to choose between its medical mission and adherence to Catholic doctrine. Of course a conservative should be on the side of the Catholic authorities and not the hospital.
Also: nothing I said (or even implied) suggests that I think all or even most abortions involve absolute medical necessity. But some of them are, and allowing medical personnel to indulge their right of conscience could get in the way of providing necessary medical help.
As for Title VII, nothing in the provisions of this act fits the situation of a professional (such as a health care provider) who refuses to provide a service on the basis of his or her religion or philosophical viewpoint. I would suggest trying to get a Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications ruling that would allow a religious test to be applied to medical personnel. Relaxation of Title VII restrictions already exists with regard to sex (United Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187 (1991) 111 S.Ct. 1196), (Dothard v. Rawlinson, 433 U.S. 321 (1977) 97 S.Ct. 2720), and a few others.
To Mr. Mulligan,
Something I’ve never understood about conservatives on abortion. If you believe that upwards of 40 million people have been killed by physicians acting on the request of patients, then why isn’t it a top conservative priority to identify all who were involved, find them, prosecute and punish them? After all, from your standpoint they comitted murder. Instead, conservatives just lament abortion or make vague pronouncements about how nice it will be when a conservative SCOTUS overturns Roe v. Wade, or they get enough voting strength to pass a constitutional amendment. Why aren’t conservatives courageous enough to follow the logic of their own position? There are millions of murderers out there–shouldn’t they be punished?
Gestell,
You question merits a response.
1) Abortion is not murder under current law, so how might these perps be prosecuted?
2) If the law is changed, how could the effect be retroactive? Abortions prior to the law were accomplished legally.
3) If the law was changed, it could only occur in an evironment of substantial cultural change, i.e., a significant majority of people would want the law changed.
4) Abortion proponents argue that abortion ought to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Aside from that fact that only the first two are actually what they want, the third item sets the stage for the idea that abortions are a bad thing.
If abortion is bad, then what would be bad about banning it?
Reply to Mountain Man:
1. Obviously, my comment is based on the premise that a conservative majority would criminalize abortion. Given what most conservatives claim to believe about the costs of abortion (millions of people murdered), I think my premise is a reasonable one.
2. Look at abortion by means of an analogy (congenial, surely, to conservatives)to Nazi war crimes. Nazis who committed deeds for which they are, even now, hunted down and punished, did not violate any laws of Nazi Germany when they killed Jews and others. I don’t think we should worry overly much about retrospective criminalization of abortion.
3.I’m assuming that, with about 60% of the American public identifying itself as ‘conservative,’ it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the Right to continue the process of cultural change it has already begun.
4.There are very few pro-choice people who claim that abortion is simply ‘good.’ Most who are pro-choice acknowledge that a decision to terminate a pregnancy is likely to be very difficult. I know of no proponent of ‘choice’ who regards this decision as casual or easy.
5. This is one those issues on which no convenient compromise seems feasible. Abortion is either allowed (doubtless with legal qualifications, which is the case now–and no, the US does not have ‘abortion on demand.’) or it is not. Conservatives opposed to abortion are also able, conveniently, to dodge any serious questions about the fates of children born to women who do not want to have them. Pleasantries about making adoption easier, etc. are all very well, but then conservatives turn around and seek the destruction of the various social service programs and agencies that are charged with dealing with children. This isn’t quite conservative hypocrisy–it is rather conservative moral indifference, or simply conservatism as applied in the real world.
You absolutely miss my point in referring you to the Catholic hospital story. The EMTs (or whoever did transport)and the hospital did NOT make their decisions based on any opposition to abortion any of the personnel involved might have had.
I’m not sure what greater point you were trying to make that I missed, but yes, that’s exactly what I said. You cited me that story as an illustration of the example you gave wherein EMTs, doctors, and other medical personnel of Christian faith would deny life-saving care to a patient undergoing an abortion when the story illustrates exactly the opposite – a women undergoing an abortion at a Catholic facility with the full endorsement of that facility’s Catholic ethics board. The one case on the whole wide internet that you could find where an abortion had to be performed out of actual medical necessity at a Christian facility and it doesn’t even make your point for you – the outcome was exactly the opposite!
allowing medical personnel to indulge their right of conscience could get in the way of providing necessary medical help.
Not if the hospital, clinic, or practice that hires the personnel stipulates in their employment contract that their medical personnel have to provide such services regardless of whether or not it violates their religious moral objection. But that is religious discrimination. And discrimination is wrong, remember?
Particularly in the case of pharmacists, which was the actual topic of this piece, there is more than enough market competition that allowing a practitioner to exercise both his human right to conscience as well as his free market right to refuse to engage in commerce will not deny anyone access to the drugs they want or need. Making a woman drive 2 extra blocks to the nearest Walgreens to get her Preven EC prescription filled because Christian Mart Pharmacy wouldn’t do it is hardly comparable to the fiction of allowing a pregnant female gunshot victim to die on the operating table because the doctor would have to perform an abortion to save her life. You are groping for outlandishly fanciful hypothetical situations to support your argument that, essentially, you believe that anyone who disagrees with you should be obligated to adopt your moral viewpoint or surrender his career. This may surprise you, but I actually hope you get exactly what you want. A government totalitarian enough to accomplish such a feat will also, if history is any guide, be the first to put the academics to the concentration camps – it’ll give you a chance to live the courage of your convictions.
As for Title VII, nothing in the provisions of this act fits the situation of a professional (such as a health care provider) who refuses to provide a service on the basis of his or her religion or philosophical viewpoint.
It certainly fits the situation of forbidding the hiring of a medical professional based upon his religious moral viewpoint, which is the only practical method of enforcement of your dictate that all personnel in the medical field with direct access to patients must be ready and willing to perform abortions as a condition of employment.
Why aren’t conservatives courageous enough to follow the logic of their own position? There are millions of murderers out there–shouldn’t they be punished?
Mountain Man addressed your points in the exact manner that I would have.
It’s notable that before Roe v. Wade the legality of abortion was actually dealt with at a state level, whereto most conservatives want to return it, since regulating abortion fell nowhere within the enumerated powers of the federal government until it was discovered that the right to be secure from improper search or seizure entailed a right to privacy that included the right to be secure in procuring an elective medical procedure.
To further address your purely hypothetical fictional future wherein religious fundamentalists have hijacked the entire United States government and outlawed abortion entirely (along, presumably, with fornication, homosexuality, contraception, art, science, reading and education) would be as stupid and fruitless as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
and no, the US does not have ‘abortion on demand.’
A woman in the United States can procure an abortion as an elective procedure, with the very recent “partial birth” abortion ban being just about the only legal qualification on the procedure. European law, that Holy Grail of American “liberal” legal theory, is actually much more restrictive in allowing the procedure. So call it what you will, but it ain’t tough to get an abortion in America, the liberal narrative of women forced into a back alley with a coat hanger because the fundamentalist Christian EMTs won’t take her to the Catholic hospital where she would be stamped with a scarlet letter and turned out into the street by the attending doctor notwithstanding.
Pleasantries about making adoption easier, etc. are all very well, but then conservatives turn around and seek the destruction of the various social service programs and agencies that are charged with dealing with children.
Generally, the “making adoption easier” part involves removing government from the process, and the adoption process usually involves placing adoptive children into financially secure homes, so between the two there would presumably be greatly diminished demand for the “various social service programs and agencies that are charged with dealing with children”. Since “you liberals” never tire of telling us how much more you care about children than those fascist, heartless conservatives, you’d think you’d prefer placing children into functional, financially stable homes over doling out trifling monthly welfare stipends to irresponsible parents so they can raise their children in grinding poverty, and/or removing children from their homes and placing them into foster care (that being the work of those compassionate social service programs and agencies that are charged with dealing with children). This isn’t quite liberal hypocrisy–it is rather liberal moral indifference, or simply liberalism as applied in the real world.
A pro-abortion editorial appearing in the September 1970 issue of [I]California Medicine[/I] contains a revealing statement on [B]lying in the service of killing[/B]:
[blockquote]“Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of [B][U]the scientific fact[/U][/B], [B][U]which everybody knows[/U][/B], that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable [U][B]semantic gymnastics[/B][/U] which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but the taking of a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often [B][U]put forth under socially impeccable auspices[/U][/B]. It is suggested that this [B][U]schizophrenic sort of subterfuge[/U][/B] is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.” [Emphasis added][/blockquote]
The liberal mindset represents the most grotesque form of hypocrisy. While decrying society’s will being forced on them, liberals have no hesitation with forcing their will on society, including the most innocent. As Mountain Man observed, they even refuse to admit they are forcing their will on anyone, because, hey, they are “right”, and it is only good and correct for [U][B]their[/U][/B] beliefs to prevail.
The individual liberties celebrated in western civilization since the Enlightenment require for their preservation certain ethical, moral, and legal prohibitions on human action. For these prohibitions to function, they must be incorporated into the individual conscience in the course of normal development. This requirement is critically important. If widespread in the population, serious defects in the development of conscience and ethical ideals, including the “work ethic” of economically productive activity, invariably result in the breakdown of social order, which is the liberal’s intermediate goal. Morally and ethically competent individuals, by contrast, can establish through agreement and cooperative effort, and through appeal to the wisdom of history, all of the economic, social, and political institutions required to sustain social order and to meet human material and relational needs. – [I]The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness[/I], by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D.[/blockquote]
Liberalism denies all this, especially the wisdom of history. Liberalism affirms the sovereignty of the individual will, that [B][I]the individual human will is the highest and best value, and asserts that the individual will is the arbiter of all value.[/I][/B] Within society, all individual human wills are considered of equal value, validity, and worth; and there is no principle [i.e., God] by which to discern among them. Society [to the liberal] is then a contest of a will to power, of asserting one’s preferences over those of others. And that’s exactly what we are facing: the asserting of liberals’ preferences over those of others, especially those trying to sustain the social order. This anarcho-tyranny translates into affirmation of the individual human will over such traditional values as private property, public order, and even human life. Abortion is the perfect example of this.
Society, like most things in this universe, require constant input of energy [i.e., work] to maintain its social order; otherwise, like other systems, the natural tendency of order to disorder takes over. Liberal ideology not only removes that energy, but accelerates the disorder by reversing the energy [throws gasoline on the fire, so to speak]. In a society of complete disorder, man will suffer greatly, and anyone who advocates that has a mental disorder.
Without belaboring my example too much more, its point should be clear: a very different outcome might well have taken place IF health care providers had exercised the right to conscience you apparently advocate.
You seem to think you’ve caught me in some sort of dilemma with your repetition of the idea that a hospital or clinic might stipulate in its employment contract that medical personnel have to provide abortion services regardless of whether such actions violate their religious beliefs. As if you are concluding your prosecutor’s summation, you thunder [if you could do this in print..]:
“But that is religious discrimination. And discrimination is wrong, remember? “
No, we liberals aren’t so silly as to say ‘discrimination is wrong.’ ‘Discrimination” is a fact of life, as libertarians keep reminding us. So be it. All we liberals are opposed to are examples of discrimination that harm people, degrade them, and deny them opportunities. That’s why we can’t sign onto the libertarian belief that racial discrimination should be tolerated out of respect for individual freedom. No, this kind of exercise of freedom is illegitimate. So is the ‘freedom’ of the health care professional who, when he or she completed training, set aside his or her own particular biases when it comes to the duties of the professions they have chosen. I doubt if you think EMTs should exercise their ‘freedom’ to engage in racial prejudice if they refuse to transport someone from an ethnic group they despise. (Although you might….)
Hell, maybe you’re one of those people who think that Christian Scientists and other religious groups should be free to withhold life-saving medical care from their children on religious grounds. But, assuming you are not, you might actually think that a parent is obligated morally (and maybe even legally) to do what he or she can to protect the life of his or her child. (Again, can I really be sure of that…)
Then you go all dramatic on me, with talk of totalitarian states and concentration camps, and dire wishes for my future. Isn’t it possible for conservatives to have some knowledge of the way the world works? Government as such, no matter who or what runs it, makes laws and policies in accord with some set of moral beliefs. If you reject this, then you reject government—any government, all government. In other words, the professional responsibility of the health care professional trumps his or her insistence on indulging personal biases, whether religious or not. I suppose it would be possible to formalize this in the terms of employment, if that makes things easier for you to accept.
Now, as for some of your other points: We liberals usually reject the idea that abortion is something that should be left to the states; the very idea that abortion might be legal in one state and illegal in another strikes most of us as a violation of the whole idea that the United States is actually a single nation (something I know lots of conservatives still really don’t agree with). Consistent conservatives would extend state variations in rights to all areas, which would bring the US into the position favored by lots of people on the Right—a loose alliance of sovereign states.
As for your effort, and that of Mountain Man, to employ an impossibility argument—that there is no way the Right can gain total control of the US to impose its views, etc.—I agree. I would point out, however, that the vision of many on the Right, the goal, the end-condition that is sought through political action by conservatives—is precisely such a situation. Just as many on the Left dream of a democratic socialist system where everyone shares the values of solidarity, many on the Right yearn for a morally uniform society where everyone agrees on a happy blend of evangelical Christianity and the free market, with nary a moral conflict in sight.
As for abortion on demand: surely you’ve heard of various SCOTUS decisions that allow states to impose a variety of conditions on women seeking abortions. The effect of these measures is to make abortion on demand harder to secure. And surely you’ve also read that there are states in which there are few, or even no, abortion providers. Some of the more militant right-to-life advocates have been able to employ violence quite effectively against providers. Killing someone is a good way to stop him from doing what you don’t like, and how many doctors really want to put their lives at risk every day intheir own clinics?
As for getting the state out of adoption, how, precisely, would you handle questions involving birth parents surrendering their rights over their children—something often needed to facilitate an adoption? And who is going to make the determination that a child should be removed from a family setting that is dangerous? And who is going to put resources together to provide much of anything for children who have no families or who have been abandoned? A real libertarian should say: “no one,” because none of these things is necessary, let alone morally defensible. For the children, it’s just their tough luck in an unfair world. A conservative should say ‘the private sector,’ so if that’s your view, explain to me what sort of a business model is necessary for a corporation to step in and try to make a profit out of doing all these things? I’ll bet your stock screener wouldn’t even pick up a company that tried to do this.
As for placing children in stable homes, we all agree that this is great—but once again, who makes these judgments? And what about those kids who don’t manage to be appealing enough or healthy enough to interest prospective adoptive parents? As a parent of two adopted children, I can relate horror stories of “disrupted” adoptions, where people who have adopted a child return him or her because of severe behavioral problems and illness. Of course, as a conservative, you don’t have to pay any attention to any of this, and it’s just much easier to attack the budgets of public agencies and rail against taxes, and it’s so much more soul-satisfying. All your side can do is to imagine arrangements which have none of the problems of the real world, and congratulate itself for its tough-minded realism. Please.
All we liberals are opposed to are examples of discrimination that harm people, degrade them, and deny them opportunities.
So, like, for instance, let’s say that a hospital only hires secular utilitarians to work in its facility because it prioritizes the providing of abortions above all other personnel considerations; and all of the surgeons, doctors, nurses, physicians assistants, and nurse assistants in the area who hold different religious or moral viewpoints are denied the opportunity for employment and ostracized from the medical community. “You liberals” would oppose that, right? Because one group was disadvantaged because of their beliefs at the expense of another?
So is the ‘freedom’ of the health care professional who, when he or she completed training, set aside his or her own particular biases when it comes to the duties of the professions they have chosen.
So exactly what ‘freedoms’ do medical professionals retain when they graduate from medical school? Why should doctors be allowed to exercise their freedom to decide what price they want to charge for their service? Why should they be allowed to specialize in fields that are already saturated with doctors when there are niche medical specialties that need their services more? Why should health care professionals have the freedom to exercise bias in treating patients? After all, the neurosurgeon and the gynecologist both have the same basic medical training. Why should they be allowed to discriminate based on their medical specialty?
Government as such, no matter who or what runs it, makes laws and policies in accord with some set of moral beliefs. If you reject this, then you reject government—any government, all government.
You repeat this exact same argument in every topic you discuss at this website regardless of its actual relation to the discussion or the subject and never find yourself in disagreement with the libertarians or the conservatives, so I don’t understand why you still believe it to be a novel or unique proposition. If you want to make anarchy the strawman for your supposed “liberalism” write a book on the subject.
In context, I suppose what you mean to say is that the government that imposes your moral vision is legitimate in all cases because it is the government’s duty to impose some concept of morality, so it might as well be yours. That’s well and good until the same government takes up a moral position you oppose. Liberals found this out during the Bush administration when all of the power they had accrued to the executive branch in the furtherance of their agenda was used for purposes they opposed, like war and ending stem cell research on human embryos. There is a minor difference in that example, however, in that no one was forced to go to war against his moral objection or denied a career in the medical field because of his research specialty. So let’s think of something more closely analogous to your proposition:
Let’s say the supreme court overturned Roe v. Wade tomorrow and outlawed abortion in all cases, including rape, incest, and life of the mother. Government would simply be exercising its legitimate function by making laws and policies consistent with some moral standard, exactly as it did when it decided the Roe v. Wade case in the first place, and you would not oppose it or stand in the way of progress, would you? And, naturally, respecting the rule of law and the legitimate role of government as the arbiter of morality, you would support the jailing and expulsion from the profession of any medical professional caught providing, aiding, or assisting in abortions or abortive remedies, correct? Those are rhetorical questions, obviously. I know you’re a man with strong principles and the courage of your convictions, and consequently you would subjugate your own personal moral viewpoint to the greater moral good – just as you demand others to do the same.
In other words, the professional responsibility of the health care professional trumps his or her insistence on indulging personal biases, whether religious or not.
What exactly is the “professional responsibility” of a health care professional? Who decided? You? Congress? Hippocrates (certainly not – the Hippocratic Oath specifically forbids providing pessary as an abortive remedy)? Prior to the first successful organ transplant in 1954, medical ethicists argued that it was a violation of professional responsibility for a doctor to operate on a healthy patient (the donor) or violate a healthy organ for transplantation. Yet over time transplantation became accepted in the medical community. In the interim, surgeons opposed to transplantation were not forced by law to perform transplantations. Pharmacists who opposed transplantation were not forced by law to dispense anti-rejection drugs to transplant patients.
There is currently a lot of debate among doctors about opioid pain management. Doctors who oppose opioids for pain management are not forced by law to treat patients with chronic pain with opioids. Pharmacists are not forced by law to dispense opioids to pain management patients.
A raging ethical debate about human cloning has been going on very seriously for at least the last 2 decades on both secular and religious grounds. Regardless of the result of that debate, I suspect that doctors will not be forced by law to clone human beings, nor will pharmacists be forced by law to provide drugs used to support the cloning process.
So it seems abortion is the only procedure in the medical field where the conscience, bias, preference, or whatever you want to call the individual decision of the doctor, must be legally usurped in order to preserve the very function of medicine itself.
I suppose it would be possible to formalize this in the terms of employment, if that makes things easier for you to accept.
A private employer setting the conditions of employment for his or her employees is indeed easier for me to accept than the government setting the conditions of employment for every individual in an entire industry, forcing individuals to choose between the legal ability to practice their craft or violating their individual morality and ethics. Because the former is a voluntary exchange that preserves the right of the individual to his conscience while the latter is fascism. I suppose you may refer to this fascism as “professional responsibility” if it makes things easier for you to accept, but you are merely playing semantics.
Consistent conservatives would extend state variations in rights to all areas, which would bring the US into the position favored by lots of people on the Right—a loose alliance of sovereign states.
Consistent conservatives do. So do inconsistent liberals, when it suits their cause du jour. That’s why marijuana and illegal border crossing are legal in California in defiance of federal law, and residents of Massachusetts are required to purchase state-mandated health insurance. I know it really sticks in your craw, but the founders did not establish an overarching central government to which the states were subordinate. The 14th Amendment did not repeal the 10th, and you’ve still got quite a bit of work to do via judicial fiat before that is even the de facto standard, let alone an actual constitutional principle. You are essentially accusing conservatives of actually being conservative. Not exactly a bit “gotcha”, but if it does something for you, then mazel tov.
many on the Right yearn for a morally uniform society where everyone agrees on a happy blend of evangelical Christianity and the free market, with nary a moral conflict in sight.
Many on the left molest little children and beat their wives. Awful, isn’t it? Seriously, if you just want to trade barbs at least come up with something creative.
As for abortion on demand: surely you’ve heard of various SCOTUS decisions that allow states to impose a variety of conditions on women seeking abortions. The effect of these measures is to make abortion on demand harder to secure. And surely you’ve also read that there are states in which there are few, or even no, abortion providers.
Difficult is not the same as impossible. If you want an abortion in America during the first 7 months or so of your pregnancy, the only thing stopping you from getting one is a lack of ambition. Even in the states where abortion is the least accessible it’s less difficult to obtain than a handgun. And firearms are actually named in the constitution (that amendment is also yet to be repealed). Like I said, call it whatever you want. It’s quibbling over a triviality.
Some of the more militant right-to-life advocates have been able to employ violence quite effectively against providers. Killing someone is a good way to stop him from doing what you don’t like
Well you’ve got a point there. Violence has, historically, been the way right-wingers get what they want. But the real problem is that there aren’t enough tenure track positions available for all of them.
As for getting the state out of adoption, how, precisely, would you handle questions involving birth parents surrendering their rights over their children—something often needed to facilitate an adoption?
You are aware that there is private adoption in this country today, right? Both through private agencies and also through direct individual adoption? This and your previous posting make it seem as if you thought adoption was a state monopoly. To answer your question, you’d handle it with the same legal instruments you use now. Filing legal paperwork to transfer custody is not quite the same as having a government bureaucracy administer the adoption process. It’s the difference between filing paperwork to transfer a property deed and having the government act as your realtor.
And who is going to make the determination that a child should be removed from a family setting that is dangerous?
Cops? And judges? Those are generally the parties responsible for enforcing the law.
And who is going to put resources together to provide much of anything for children who have no families or who have been abandoned?
The church? Goodwill? YMCA? Salvation Army? United Way? Red Cross? Boyscouts of America?
A real libertarian should say: “no one,” because none of these things is necessary, let alone morally defensible. For the children, it’s just their tough luck in an unfair world.
A real libertarian should say: “You!” Follow your moral convictions and support them with your money and resources. Following your moral convictions by confiscating other people’s money at the point of a government gun (literal or metaphorical) is faux righteousness.
A conservative should say ‘the private sector,’
This would actually be the logical extension of the libertarian answer as well. Being an academic who teaches political philosophy, your ignorance is understandable.
explain to me what sort of a business model is necessary for a corporation to step in and try to make a profit out of doing all these things? I’ll bet your stock screener wouldn’t even pick up a company that tried to do this.
Catholic Charities? Goodwill? YMCA? Salvation Army? United Way? Red Cross? Boyscouts of America?
Corporations – and individuals for that matter – don’t have to be profit seeking, as the thousands of charitable non-profits in this country aptly demonstrate. With enough generous benefactors with compassion for children, like yourself and your fellow liberals, they can fulfill their mission reliably and efficiently without relying on the coercion of government. The only problem with that theory, of course, is that liberals are pretty conservative with their own money and give less to charity than conservatives despite having higher incomes. So while “you liberals” write off $6 worth of used underwear donated to Salvation Army on your tax return, those heartless bastard conservatives and libertarians go about living their values by supporting private charity and using their own resources to accomplish the social goals that please them.
As for placing children in stable homes, we all agree that this is great—but once again, who makes these judgments?
Adoption agencies? Biological parents? Families?
And what about those kids who don’t manage to be appealing enough or healthy enough to interest prospective adoptive parents?
Bummer? Put them in the care of foster parents, private charities, private agencies, churches. Can you honestly picture a situation where a private organization would actually do worse by the children than the state system, which is known for producing juvenile delinquents and criminal miscreants with a revolving door between child services and the criminal justice system? Seriously, what’s the worst that could happen?
All your side can do is to imagine arrangements which have none of the problems of the real world, and congratulate itself for its tough-minded realism. Please.
And all your side can do is to imagine government solutions to problems it created by implementing its last government solution and congratulate itself for its humanitarianism. Please, indeed.
All of that is really just a long-winded repetition of what I summarized before in a single sentence:
You believe that anyone who disagrees with you should be obligated to adopt your moral viewpoint or surrender his career.
It’s really no more or less complicated than that. It is lucky for you that your political opposition does not feel the same way – you might find yourself in or out of a job each time an election is held.
All we liberals are opposed to are examples of discrimination that harm people, degrade them, and deny them opportunities.
So how would you characterize the attempt by liberals to eliminate the GATE Program, a program for extraordinary students?
If what you say is true, how is this program an “example of discrimination that harms people, degrades them, and denies them opportunities”? [And before you claim this attempt is not a liberal one, let me say it certainly isn’t conservative.]
I look at this as an example of liberal radical egalitarianism achieved the only way it can be: by bringing the talented down to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Reply to Gestell
Considering your reply to my comment I see that you were either sitting on your brains and were starved for oxygen, you were gloating over the attention you’re getting or your synapses had a short circuit. Your answer is a non answer that reminds me of a fellow worker who would make a comment and ran away because he like you is running away from the truth and blowing smoke to hide behind it.
If you persist on avoiding the truth to the bitter end you’re liable to end up in a place whose address on it’s door says “abandon yee all hope that enter here”. What’s the matter did they fail, in their brain washing sessions, to provide any room for extended thoughtfullness? I experience many responses that smack of regurgitation of speeches pronounced by politicos who know that the multitudes will swallow and inscribe in their memory if repeated ad nauseum when they correspond to the established entitlement mentality of the wards of the state!
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