Another terrible, terrible idea, brought to you by the Bush administration:
The Bush administration today issued a sweeping new regulation that protects a broad range of health-care workers—from doctors to janitors—who refuse to participate in providing services that they believe violate their personal, moral or religious beliefs.
This silliness will not prevent abortions, first off. It’s a first step in a long march toward larger legislative actions based on religion; specifically Christianity. But if that’s not bad enough, let’s all play a game: count the days until someone whose personal beliefs involve racism, sexism, homophobia, or another intolerant views ends up getting a patient killed.
Can this administration get any worse? Well, I guess we’ve got a month more to find out.
It would be cool if this applied to the military. Seriously. If you don’t believe in the justness of the Iraq War, you don’t need to fight in it.
The problems there are obvious. But they’re obvious in the health-care-worker case too.
I don’t imagine this will protect the health-care workers from civil suits. If a doctor refuses to operate on (say) a gay patient, and that patient dies, his family can still sue. Such is the hope, anyway.