Most of us have an ethical and/or religious framework which
influences our beliefs about morally complex issues like the
right to die or abortion. But progressives as a rule don't
shout these beliefs from the rooftops. Traditionally these
decisions have been seen as intensely personal. But religious
extremists have changed all that, and journalist Russ Baker
says it's time for progressives to act publicly—and
not leave it to religious extremists to set the agenda.
Russ
Baker is a regular contributor to TomPaine.com.
Have you ever seen tables turn so fast?
The same people who for so many years have decried a decline
in personal freedom are rapidly becoming domestic
interventionists of the first order.
The religious far right and its allies are interfering with
the delivery of products and services and the most
intimate compacts between spouses. You know about Terri
Schiavo. But are you aware of a growing trend in which service
professionals put their religious beliefs ahead of their most
basic obligations to the public? You don’t have to be a
fanatic about civil liberties to feel discomfited about this
latest assault on simple human decencies.
Monday’s Washington Post reported on the increasing
numbers of pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for
birth control and morning-after pills, saying that doing so
would violate personal tenets.
Like the Terri Schiavo case, where ardent defenders of the
sanctity of traditional marriage were willing to poke every
branch of government into the private business of husband and
wife, the harmful activism of right-wing pharmacists affords
reasonable-minded, middle-of-the-road or progressive folks a
fine opportunity to seize the moral high ground,
and begin moving the national conversation away from
cynical, demagogic politicians and the mobs they foment.
Before batting around tactical approaches to getting the
public the truth about these growing transgressions against
liberty, let’s look a little more carefully at the
problem.
A pharmacist’s central function is to act as an agent of
the health care system, a distribution point between a doctor
and a patient. Pharmacists cannot prescribe medicines, they
can only deliver them. As such, they obviously shouldn’t
be making decisions on what medicines members of the public
can and cannot access— just as supermarket employees
who are vegetarians may not refuse to ring up meat
products. (If some religious pharmacists cannot
reconcile dispensing certain meds with their consciences, they
have the honorable alternative of taking up another line of
work.)
Defenders of this new vigilantism, including a group called
“Pharmacists for Life,” claim that patients can always get
their needs filled by another pharmacist. But that isn’t
always that easy— sometimes, there is no other
pharmacist around (especially in rural areas), and sometimes,
the “Life” pharmacists even hold the phoned-in prescriptions
hostage rather than release them to someone else who will
honor them.
The Post chronicles cases where it took patients
so long to find a pharmacist who would honor the prescription,
that the window for, say, preventing a pregnancy, had already
passed. One wonders what kind of responsibility those “Life”
pharmacists would be willing to assume for the well-being of
the child born of an unintended pregnancy. Or how they feel
about their probable role in actually increasing the number of
abortion procedures. Or how they understood the role of the
pharmacist when they joined the profession.
This and the Schiavo case are but a few examples of a
rising tide of societal or individual professional decisions
made “for” others— which includes teachers not
wanting to teach evolution or parents not wanting others’ kids
to get an unambiguous understanding of a universally accepted
scientific concept. But it really hits home when life and
death are concerned. It probably won’t be long before we hear
about police officers, emergency medical technicians, and
others starting to ignore the rules and making their own
personal, “moral” judgments. Then we’ll really see the whole
issue of rights—and who should exercise
them— explode.
Now would be a fine time to start discussing this, and not
leave it to religious extremists to set the agenda. When
Congress got steamrolled to vote for federal intervention in
the Schiavo matter, many of those supporting the bill seemed
conflicted, and later confessed to having serious doubts about
what they were doing. Surely, they too would have appreciated
a little “moral” guidance.
By all indications, the far right had the entire Schiavo
thing stage-managed down to the smallest detail, with broad
cooperation between institutions, talking points agreed upon,
and everyone working in overdrive on overtime. It would help a
great deal if the forces of reason brought a similar energy to
preparing for the controversies of the future.
How can rational people start dominating the debate? By
preparing to publicly articulate and defend a set of basic
principles on life, death, medical care, etc.—on all
the key moral issues. Some pro-choice advocates are
already working to frame the abortion issue as part of a
broader effort to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and to shift
the onus onto those who oppose abortion under any
circumstances, by asking them to come up with workable
alternatives—emphasis on workable .
Put in a snappier fashion, instead of concentrating on the
unborn or the essentially dead, how about these right-wing
moral authorities show some attention to the living? How can
you support meddling in unrelated strangers’
affairs— but oppose broad, helpful intervention on
issues that affect everyone— like health insurance
for kids and the poor?
We’ll know we’re on the right track when zinger TV ads air
that express our views. Simple ads stressing simply
how the new movements unleashed by the Schiavo
affair and "Pharmacists for Life" are
attacking relationships most Americans believe to
be intensely personal—thus
threatening the very concept of “Husband & Wife” and
“Patient & Doctor”—could be very effective.
Evoking emotion is certainly appropriate—for
example, driving home the devastation a woman feels when she
gets a lecture from her pharmacist and is left to wander the
streets in search of a pharmacy that will honor her
prescription.
There’s nothing wrong with going a
little harder, too. Since, it turns out, that both Tom DeLay
and Robert Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s father, approved of
‘unplugging’ their parents when doctors said there was no
hope, it’s perfectly appropriate to raise this. Cyncism and
hypocrisy are incredibly potent villains. Both Tom DeLay
and Robert Schindler took doctors’ advice and allowed
vegetative-state relatives to die with peace and dignity. Why
won’t they allow Terri Schiavo and her husband the same
right?
The purpose of such ads will be not
just to win a narrowly focused debate on this or that issue,
but also to discredit the entire right-wing apparatus of
distortion and disinformation, and refocus debate on real life
and death concerns.
Social issues aren’t just for
mobilizing fanatics anymore. They’re for recapturing the moral
high ground and bringing it back where it belongs: with the
sane, the reasonable, the decent and the
fair.
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