On the subject of the Obama administration requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives, I have a post up over at AMERICAblog Gay looking at what else the Catholic Church and their evangelical brethren are demanding in the name of "religious liberty." Here's a snippet:
They're not just a church when they're the only hospital in town. They're not just a church when they're using taxpayer funds to discriminate against taxpayers.
But this is the future the Catholic Church, and their evangelical/Mormon buddies, are wishing on the rest of America. They're increasingly involved in more and more non-proselytizing ventures - hell, they're not permitted to proselytize with government money - yet when it's revealed that they're discriminating against their own employees or the public at large, suddenly the operating room becomes the divine liturgy. (Which is a neat trick: Maybe Catholics should drop their insurance cards in the offering plate next Sunday, since apparently it's all the same thing.)
So what's next? If Catholic hospitals are permitted to discriminate against their non-Catholic employees in health care, then I assume they should be able to discriminate in who they hire. And who they serve. After all, would you really want a Catholic hospital to have to serve homosexuals? Or adulterers? Or Baptists? Think that's an absurd analogy, think again. The religious extremists have been arguing for years that pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to serve any customer that violates their conscience. Generally, they mean giving out birth control. But what about AIDS drugs? Should Catholic and Evangelical pharmacists be permitted to fill AIDS cocktail prescriptions only for the "innocent victims" of AIDS? Forget about the gays and the druggies. Only children who were infected via their moms are permitted to get their drugs, and even then, it's unclear how we should treat those Mormon children since Catholics and Evangelicals might consider them members of a cult. And don't even get started on Muslims. They can move back to Mecca if they want antibiotics.
And how about a Jehovah's Witness pharmacist. Can they refuse to sell any prescription drugs at all?
