Well, given the fact that groups don’t like these laws, and they are still on the books, it is at least prima facie evidence of their constitutionality.
It is not a law designed to suppress the exercise of a particular religious view. It simple isn’t a case like Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), which is one of the few times (if not the only one) where a Court has invalidated a seemingly generally applicable law as targeted against a particular religion. That law was pretty obviously targeted at Santeria. Laws like this have a purpose expressed in them - of ensuring the availability of a legal product from a state-regulated supplier. That’s a legitimate government interest. That ensuring that interest is met conflicts with some people’s religious beliefs is neither here not there under governing law. There just isn’t a history of animus towards the religious beliefs at stake here unlike in City of Hialeah, where the court saw the law as being directly targeted at an unpopular minority religion.
As for the way the laws work - I don’t know. I haven’t look at them in detail, and indeed said earlier in this thread that I wasn’t aware of the way they worked.
The fact you keep calling this an anti-religiously motivated law shows you don’t understand the case law underlying this. It simply isn’t. It has an impact on some people more than others because of their religious beliefs, but the state legislature didn’t sit down and think “how can we screw over the Catholics,” for example. Instead they sought to ensure the availability of legal drugs. Which, I will say again, is a legitimate state interest.
This thread is a beautiful illustration of how those on the left do not deserve to be called “liberals”, as the term belies their actual statist authoritarian views.
I don’t think the government should be allowed to compel physicians to act against their conscience. Fortunately, in the less-than-red state of IL, the lawagrees with me, and from what I can tell, it would seem to apply to pharmacists as well:
I don’t know that you can equate total sales to how much money a pharmacy makes. I don’t know how it works in the US, but I’m in Canada and I’m pretty sure the pharmacy’s income is not related to the value of the prescriptions. Pharmacies dispense, rather than selling themselves; so they don’t make more money by selling an expensive drug than a cheap one. AFAIK, Pharmacies make their money on dispensing fees. Whether a prescription costs $10 or $1,000, the pharmacy gets the same dispensing fee.
So maybe contraceptives are 10% of prescriptions dispensed by a pharmacy, but less than 10% of total prescription costs (since there are many drugs that are much more expensive than contraceptives).
There appears to be different lines of discussion in this thread regarding an individual pharmacist versus a business. The op was specific to a situation involving an individual employee who’s skill is licensed and is independent of what the business intends. If the business wishes to sell an item and the employee finds it objectionabl then it is reasonable for the business to see that as an “at will” arrangement.
A business should be able to stock their shelves with whatever product they wish within the agreed permit to operate. If there is no agreement to stock a specific product type they should not be held to it for whatever reason chosen.
Only in the eyes of someone who thinks that only coercion by the government counts, and that it’s perfectly all right to coerce, harass or kill someone if you don’t do so for the government.
I self-describe as “liberal” and am in favor of letting the pharmacist decide what to dispense. I think you’re simply assigning the label “liberal” to people who’s opinions you don’t like. Many folks in this thread haven’t identified their political leanings.
Au contraire. I made the assumption that most of the people who have posted in favor of forcing the pharmacist to dispense would self-identify as liberal. I would not bestow that noble title on them as I feel they don’t deserve it.
When you said that people who want to make pharmacists do their jobs and dispense medicine to people who need it aren’t liberal. You are defining “liberal” as someone who is willing to let pharmacists harass, endanger and kill people.
That’s absurd. A pharmacist who refuses to dispense contraceptives has done none of the above, certainly no more than the customer’s next door neighbour and mailman have.
I am also enough of a dangerous statist authoritarian that I don’t think public school teachers should be able to refuse to teach brown eyed children if they feel that is their religious requirement. Well, of course they can refuse to teach those children, but they should not expect to keep their position as a public school teacher if they do.
If your job is to do something, then you do it, or else get a new job. The religious pharmacist should be held to the same standard as the atheist priest. You sell that contraceptive, and you molest that choir boy, no exceptions, or else you get a new job, the end.
Wrong. They certainly are harassing their customers, and depending on circumstances could indeed be hurting or even killing the person in question. And your neighbor and mailman examples wouldn’t be comparable unless the neighbor and mailman are rooting through his/her medicines and dumping whatever they don’t approve of.
Not my finest moment here, and certainly warrants way more investigation/analysis - this was a pretty snide post, and isn’t worthy of the argument. I’d like to file a motion to strike that post and replace with the below…
There’s a definite case that has to be answered as to whether this is a neutral law of general applicability, and so presumably constitutional, or whether it is a restriction on religious freedom that would be struck. It isn’t, on reflection, a perfect fit with Smith, because the behavior that is being controlled here is somewhat specific to a particular religion, or at least is significantly less likely to be engaged in by a non-religious person. That makes it more like the anti-santeria legislation I mentioned earlier.
There’s an overall problem in First Amendment jurisprudence, however, which makes it different to a lot of what the Court does. First Amendment cases, and in particular the religious ones, are notoriously inconsistent. Part of this, I think, is because of the very nature of Lemon analysis, which is all over the shop, but it also shows an unwillingness to overrule cases in an area which touches on very deeply held beliefs. What I would argue we see is cases allowed to stand, but isolated back to their specific fact patterns - Yoder being supplants by Smith, for example. Unfortunately, that makes it very hard to predict future decisions accurately, which leaves us with snout counting, and hence the preference for more recent decisions where current members of the Court were represented.
So, back to laws requiring state licensed pharmacists to offer contraceptives, or to fill any prescription (barring side effects etc) presented to them. Courts have shown reluctance to presume an anti-religious motivation on the part of a legislative body (which is generally sensible because it isn’t present). Where the Supreme Court found one in City of Hialeah, the law, against ritual slaughter of animals, was pretty obviously aimed at a specific religion, Santeria, and that group had been shown to have been the subject of government displeasure before. While it was presented as a neutral law with a legitimate purpose - the protection of animals - it couldn’t be justified that way because the exceptions involved were too broad. For example, it was permissible to kill the animal in the banned way if it was eaten afterwards. So the law was struck.
Here, on the other hand, we are looking at laws which are at least facially neutral. Absent evidence of antipathy towards Christianity in the areas where these laws are in force, or in the legislative history of the laws (not that the textualist wing will consider that), I don’t see that it will be considered an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom. One thing that is clear in the precedents on freedom of religion is that while belief is protected, action is not automatically (for obvious reasons, such as human sacrifice).
Yes, I’ve been busy. But the frequent flier miles help ease the pain.
What I mean, of course, is that the view I am arguing for here has won.
Yes, I agree. And that’s precisely the force that should be brought to bear: market persuasion. I have no heartburn at all with the idea that lost business will compel a decision to require employees to sell contraceptives or lose their jobs. I’m all in favor of that.
I object to the government’s use of regulation to compel it.
There is a difference. An individual acting alone is entitled to do plenty of things that we wish to forbid the government from doing. A person may establish religion by putting a Nativity scene in his front yard; the government cannot. We don’t say in response that it’s “interesting” how the left wing objects to one and not the other, because we realize that the issue changes dramatically when it’s an action taken by the government.