Mind your own god damn business
Bush strikes again – enacting last-minute sweeping regulations, this time to protect religious bigots who refuse to do their jobs.
The far-reaching regulation cuts off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, health plan, clinic or other entity that does not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other employees who refuse to participate in care they find ethically, morally or religiously objectionable. It was sought by conservative groups, abortion opponents and others to safeguard workers from being fired, disciplined or penalized in other ways.
For refusing to do the jobs they were hired to do, and for obstructing other people’s ability to get needed care.
The rule comes at a time of increasingly frequent reports of conflicts between health-care workers and patients. Pharmacists have turned away women seeking birth control and morning-after emergency contraception pills. Fertility doctors have refused to help unmarried women and lesbians conceive by artificial insemination. Catholic hospitals refuse to provide the morning-after pill and to perform abortions and sterilizations.
In other words, zealous theocrats have taken it upon themselves to tell women how to live and what to be by refusing them legal products and services – and Bush has passed a regulation protecting not the women needing legal products and services but the intrusive presumptuous theocrats telling them what to do.
While primarily aimed at doctors and nurses, it offers protection to anyone with a “reasonable” connection to objectionable care – including ultrasound technicians, nurses aides, secretaries and even janitors who might have to clean equipment used in procedures they deem objectionable.
Welcome to the world of biblical medicine.
The Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are in the thick of it as per usual.
Bush is surely having the final say before he bows out of office.
I hope Obama will review all eleventh-hour regulations and will address them once he is president.
I thought Ireland was bad, suffering under the iron fist of the Catholic church only – but America also has to contend with so many religious fists continually trying to blind it with innumerable obnoxious, objectional rules.
Obama should immediately get cracking on this one when he begins his new job.
How can presidents have such power? I guess that’s the one thing about American democracy that troubles me most is that presidents have almost as much power as 18th century kings of England. In fact, I rather think that George III would have been glad to have the power the Bush seems to be wielding just now. Even then parliaments could worry kings. But congress has no say when Bush makes sweeping regulations like this, delists endangered species, single-handedly changes rules about oil exploration in national parks, etc. I watch the whole spectacle with a bemused wonder. How does one man get that kind of power?
It wasn’t all that long ago that a wingnut blog called Little Green Footballs (also known as the Late German Fascists) was getting in all high dudgeon because some professionals were claiming “right of conscience.”
The professionals? Muslim cab drivers. Their objection? (Warning: wingnut site) Guide dogs and alcohol.
What if you object to all medicine? Would you be able to stop going to work without being sacked?
Richard: GAZE.
For those not familiar with LGF, GAZE more or less means “Begone, foul troll.”
/Banninated at LGF
@Jakob Tomasovich
“This is a wonderful rule for slackers, since it provides a legally protected way to get paid while doing no work at all. Here’s the plan:
(1) Get an MD, and a job as a doctor.
(2) Become a Christian Scientist.
(3) Announce your religious objection to participating in any medical procedure, or to supporting such procedures in any way (e.g., by doing the other doctors’ paperwork. This refusal would be protected under the rule.)
(4) When your employer protests, explain that your right to refuse to participate in any medical procedure at all is legally protected under this rule.
Voila: white-collar welfare! See how easy?” Hilzoy.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_12/016119.php
I suppose you could start your own religion. One that doesn’t “believe” in whatever procedure you find icky or tedious.
Happy Hogswatch to all.
I’m seriously wondering how this 132 page document is worded – because really, why would the result not be male Islamist doctors and nurses refusing to treat women and female Islamist doctors and nurses refusing to treat men? Not to mention technicians? And ambulance drivers? And so on? Isn’t the Bush admin just creating the necessary conditions for a complete medical clusterfuck?
Hmm. Was that some sort of rhetorical question? I would think we all have eight years of very ample evidence that the Bush administration has never not-even-once foreseen a clusterfuck for which they were creating both necessary and sufficient conditions…
Hmm…it wasn’t an altogether rhetorical question. More a stupid question perhaps. I believe my thinking was something along the lines of: the Bushies would be content to see the rules spread madly for Christian reasons-of-conscience but would they be content to see them spread madly for other religions’ reasons-of-conscience, especially Islamic ones? I don’t think they would – and it would take so little foresight to foresee that…so I asked a stupid question. I admit, I still kind of wonder.