The Bush administration is pushing its religious agenda by limiting reproductive freedom. Prescription for Controversy: Bush Endorses Move To Curtail Access To Birth Control
In the final months of his administration, Bush is trying to force through a draft regulation that will “deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions,” the Washington Post reported yesterday. In other words, if a pharmacist doesn’t want to fill a birth control prescription, he doesn’t have to.As Sandhya Bathija from AU says "Let’s hope pressure from Congress puts an end to what is hopefully one of the last of Bush’s ridiculous “faith-based” schemes."
Advocates of this regulation, of course most coming from religiously-based organizations, are painting this as an anti-discrimination measure - ensuring that people who oppose contraceptives and abortion do not have to go against their religion in order to work for a hospital or health care entity. The report cites to “numerous cases in which health-care workers had to violate their consciences by providing birth control pills and other controversial medicine and conducting controversial procedures.
This concern over discrimination and religious liberty is the Religious Right’s continual strategy to push its very narrow viewpoint on the rest of the country. But this time it is quite clear, even to medical experts and scientists, where this regulation stems from.
4 comments:
SecProgs only object to this because of their feelings about religion. They should object to it because the government doesn't have the right to arbitrarily interfere with private business practices. Bush is pushing something along the lines of letting employees say "I don't have to do my job, because the government says so."
Progressives made their own bed. As with Walmart, they think the government can interfere in principle with what is going on in the private sector, on the basis of mere feelings. Now they object when Bush does the same thing?
At least government safety regulations are standards, and not feelings conjured willy-nilly. They're designed to apply to everyone equally, without knowing in advance who they will apply to. Bush is singling out a group of people, and giving them special rights. A free society is supposed to have equality under the Law.
Politics today has degenerated into two camps of chimps screaming their feelings at each other. What happened to the exercise of human reason? The chimps will tell us that there is no reason, and reasoning is just like their own screams.
They should object to it because the government doesn't have the right to arbitrarily interfere with private business practices.
Exactly, people going into the medical and pharmaceutical professions should leave their "feelings" and beliefs at the door when they enter the workplace. If they cannot, then they should find another profession that does not hurt their religious sensitivities and "values".
And as for Walmart, coercing workers who to vote for is unethical. They are going to extremes, training managers in the fine art of using scare tactics and mental manipulation to get employees to vote a certain way. A company endorsing a candidate is common, however telling their employees how to vote is a whole other thing.
Oh, and Walmart sucks and needs to go out of business...and it probably will since it is heading down the path of Zayres who also treated their employees like slaves, paid them very low wages, no benefits and only maintained the stores as basically as they could and they were also often dirty and messy as most Walmarts are. It's not the same place as when Sam Walton was alive. He is probably spinning in his grave.
And from a Sam Walton bio:
"Walton's management style was popular with employees and he founded some of the basic concepts of management that are still in use today. After taking the company public in 1970, Walton introduced his "profit sharing plan". The profit sharing plan was a plan for Wal-Mart employees to improve their income dependent on the profitability of the store. Sam Walton believed that "individuals don't win, teams do". Employees at Wal-Mart stores were offered stock options and store discounts. These benefits are commonplace today, but Walton was among the first to implement them. Walton believed that a happy employee meant happy customers and more sales. Walton believed that by giving employees a part of the company and making their success dependent on the company's success, they would care about the company."
Now look what his successors have done to what he had built.
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