aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Yes and no

Steve Miller on suing a doctor:

A Lambda Legal attorney is suing two fundamentalist doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate lesbian Guadalupe Benitez. The doctors said to have done so would have violated their religious beliefs, and that they also would have refused to inseminate an unmarried heterosexual women.

So, Ms. Benitez couldn’t go to another doctor? The idea, it seems, is now prevalent in the gay legal world that no matter of personal conscience or religious conviction should permit a private business or practitioner to discriminate against a gay client.

I believe discriminating against gays is morally wrong. I also believe that there are limits in the ability of the state to force people to go against their personal convictions, especially in matters of abortion or procreation. There are other doctors in Southern California.

Ok, I agree. But then there’s this:

The matter has parallels with attempts to force all pharmacists to dispense birth control.

The difference that pops to mind is that doctors are the decision makers; the health practitioners. Pharmacists are dispensers.

Now I know that pharmacists once were health practitioners, and I’ll grant that those in hospitals may still be. But those at my local CVS have been reduced by insurance companies and their corporate chiefs to little more than computer jockeys who look up the med, phone in for approval, then pull it from the shelf, stick it in a bag and send me off to the register.

No, I’m not willing to give them an ethical veto over my meds.

UPDATE: A web-enabled mail order option both moots my concern and proves my point. Pharmacists aren’t what they used to be.