Because you have made no argument beyond, “A legislature enacted the law, the court thinks the law is ok.”
Jim Crow is explicitly viewed as starting post-Civil War. Yes, it was an attempt of states to maintain segregation. Nevertheless it simply has to be true, whenever it happened, that Jim Crow laws were on the rise before they saw a decline. Conscience Clause laws will perforce rise before (if they ever do) decline.
You have explained that it is not a big deal for a person to walk a few blocks to another pharmacy. You have a cite above from jackmanni where the pharmacists go further than just refusal but are obstructionist in the woman getting her medication.
You have also not told us why a pharmacist should supplant the doctor/patient relationship and the expertise of the doctor with their personal whims. Where does it stop? If the pharmacist knows a woman (because he could see it in her records) had used a Day After pill then refuse all service? Even for prescription Ibuprofen?
You’ve heard my arguments, and presumably (though God knows how it’s possible) found them unavailing. I have heard your arguments and, after my fits of laughter, similarly discounted them.
But that can’t end the inquiry. You and I aren’t the only voices to consider. How can we reach a decision on the matter?
We could simply accept the word of the ruler, appointed over us by divine right. Unfortunately, the last time we had one of those was King George III, and there was a spot of unpleasantness surrounding his decisions. So we don’t do that anymore.
I’ll avoid the detailed descriptions of other methods of rule, and just point out that we have, jointly, made an agreement about how to resolve these disputes. We pick leaders, and give them the power to express our will through the law. We may not agree with each and every decision they make, but we have a ready remedy if enough of us don’t.
However, in terms of protected classes, race and gender are not different and it may have escaped your notice, Bricker, but the drugs in question that are so desperately morally harmful are only drugs prescribed to women, and the patients who have been refused service are, again, all women. Damn our medication-needing reproductive systems.
What you’re advocating is a two-tier system, in which men can be reasonably assured that when they present a prescription for whatever medication it will be filled, while women must always be concerned that a pharmacist (who they’ve likely never met) will make a refusal, which will cause, at the very least an inconvenience and a loss of time and at the very worst (particularly for those with access limitations and rural dwellers) complete inability to receive needed medication in its efficacious timeframe, or before consequences of dosage lapses set in.
You tried to frame the analogy as race :: access to pharmacy, it’s not. It’s race :: gender, or more specifically, access to lunch service regardless of race :: access to pharmacy service regardless of gender.
There is no compelling reason why anyone should ever have to wonder, worry or fear that today will be the day that they get pushback while simply trying to get a necessary prescription filled. It’s easy to dismiss this as not being a “serious problem” and simply an “inconvenience” when it’s not a problem you will ever face and when the consequences will never impact upon your life. Just as it was easy for people to shrug and say “so you can’t eat at the Woolworth’s counter? You can eat at Mamie’s down in your end of town. What’s the big deal?”
I think a law that prohibited discrimination of dispensation of a drug you have in stock (abortion pill) based on race or sexual orientation would be bad. A law that required you to dispense the abortion pill is bad.
No but you do need an officiant in many places and the most convenient one may be the priest in the church around the corner. Why do we force that couple to go somewhere else? What if the small podunk two horse town is so religious that there is no officiant that will perform the ceremony for a gay couple?
So your point was not about discriminatory laws in general, but the specific subset of them known as “Jim Crow” laws?
Um… OK. Yes. Excellent point, Whack-a-Mole, entirely in keeping with your keen arguments here in this thread. Jim Crow laws WERE on the rise at first, and then they declined.
And did that, in fact, actually stop the patient from getting medication?
Because that’s what freedom means. If my personal whim is to go about wearing a “Whack-a-Mole Sucks” T-shirt, then I should be permitted to do so. If a pharmacists wishes to refuse service to someone because he doesn’t like her use of the day-after pill, then he should be allowed to do that. Pharmacists are not public servants. They are private actors. They are not paid by the government. They are citizens.
If a client doesn’t like his pharmacist’s refusal, or his smock, or his wall color, he can go to a different pharmacist.
That’s what our notion of freedom is.
I know you would rather that we were bees or ants, collectivist servants of the Great Public Good, and pharmacists would just accept their lot in life is to serve and not ask questions. But fortunately, that view is still in the minority, and thus will not gain a foothold.
Would you care to address the problems with your formulation that allowing pharmacies to engage in discrimination against women is somehow different in allowing lunch counters to discriminate against blacks, except perhaps in the number of individuals effected?
But the government doesn’t force people to become pharmacists. The person in question sought it out and put him/herself in that position. The pharmacist put themselves in that position and is the only one who deserves any blame.
In the original thread I conceded that a state could pass a law that could require a pharmacist to carry and dispense a specific medication. Why can’t a state pass a law that permits pharmacists to refuse to carry or dispense the abortion pill?
That’s funny-all the cases I’ve heard of so far involved women being refused medicine. Do you have different examples on hand to show us that it isn’t about women and their needs?
So, um if “the ability to refuse service is ALSO well-established in law” why do we need conscience clause laws?
Why are they called conscience clause laws? Isn’t that just pharmacists using their half-baked claims about morality to get the result they want?
Can they, and you, just switch nimbly back and forth between the law and your self-serving, amorphous and ill-defined concepts of “morality,” as pleases you?
I won’t be holding my breath waiting for these or any of my other questions to get answered.
CMC fnord!
“If a pharmacists wishes to refuse service to someone because he doesn’t like her use of the day-after pill, then he should be allowed to do that.”
Wow, I . . . wow.
The stakes aren’t equal. The woman is trying to maintain or preserve her health, her wellbeing and the full status of her life and her family. The pharmacist is trying to maintain some opaque moral standard without regard to the impact that doing so has on others.
Which conscience, conveniently, only comes into play when the act in question involves serving women with drugs that only women need.
The racial purity of my lunchcounter isn’t about negros, it’s about my right to act according to my conscience as a lunchcounter owner!
Yeah and I believe that an non-legislative body passed a rule taht was contrary to a law passed by a legislative body, which do you think survives? The dicta about the constitutionality of the matter is probably wrong.
