Special Rights for the Godly?

Let's say I'm a Jehovah's Witness, and I get a job in an understaffed emergency room where, following the dictates of my conscience, I refuse to assist with blood transfusions and try my best to persuade my fellow workers to do the same. How long do you think I'd last on the job? And after my inevitable firing, how seriously do you think a jury would take my claim that my rights had been violated? Five minutes and not very, right? A similar fate would surely await the surgeon who converts to Christian Science and decides to pray over his patients instead of operating on them, the Muslim loan officer who refuses to charge interest, the Southern Baptist psychotherapist who tells his Jewish patients they're bound for hell. The law rightly requires employers to respect employees' sincerely held religious beliefs, but not if those beliefs really do prevent an employee from performing the job for which she's been hired.

Change the subject to reproductive rights, though, and the picture gets decidedly strange. In 1999 Michelle Diaz, a born-again Christian nurse who had recently been hired by the Riverside Neighborhood Health Center, a public clinic in Southern California, decided that emergency contraception, the so-called morning after pill that acts to prevent pregnancy if taken within seventy-two hours of unprotected intercourse, was actually a method of abortion. She refused to dispense it or give referrals to other providers; the clinic offered her a position that did not involve reproductive healthcare, but when she told temporary nurses at the clinic that they too would be performing abortions by dispensing EC, Diaz, who was still on probation as a new hire, lost her job. She sued with the help of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the religious-right law firm headed by Jay Sekulow. At the end of May a jury agreed that her rights had been violated and awarded her $47,000.

Excuse me? A nurse at a public health clinic has the right to refuse to provide patients with legally mandated services, give out misleading health information in order to proselytize her co-workers to refuse as well, and keep her job? The low-income women who come to Riverside desperately in need of EC and abortion referrals are flat out of luck if they happen to turn up when the anti-choicers are on shift? Riverside is the largest public health clinic in the county, serving 150-200 patients a day, but it operates with a staff of four nurses--should those four people decide what services the clinic can offer? What about the patient's right to receive standard medical care? Or the clinic's responsibility to deliver the services for which they receive government funds?

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