Why religious authorities shouldn’t be considered moral authorities November 2, 2007
Posted by Evil Bender in Morality, News and politics, wingnuts.trackback
I’ve known many wonderful people who are Catholic, and I occasionally found myself in strong agreement with John Paul II. But as I’ve said before, I have nothing but contempt for our current Pope, the ex-nazi youth Ratzi. His latest argument against providing patients with medication is a great example:
Pope Benedict XVI said Monday that pharmacists have a right to use conscientious objection to avoid dispensing emergency contraception or euthanasia drugs — and told them they should also inform patients of the ethical implications of using such drugs.
According to the Great Moralist Ratzi, pharmacists have a right to decide what medications their patients should receive, and they have an obligation to blather their moral objections to their patient’s choices. Imagine if Doctors were expected to do the same.
Doctor: well, I’d like to prescribe you medication for your STD, but it would just encourage you to behave in sexual behavior that I find icky.
Doctor: In my view, your illness is caused not by a chemical imbalance in the brain but by demons, and therefore no medication for you.
Doctor: I would treat you, but I don’t approve of your crossdressing. I can refer you and your gunshot wound across town, if you’d like.
Funny how Ratzi is all about the culture of life, except when it interferes with what he wants.
“Pharmacists must seek to raise people’s awareness so that all human beings are protected from conception to natural death, and so that medicines truly play a therapeutic role,” Benedict said.
What exactly gives the Pope the authority to say what a Pharmacist’s job is? Only that we cede to religious leaders authority over areas where they have no expertise. I would have thought a pharmacist’s job was to dispense medication, not make pronouncements about how moral a medication is. And I would have thought medication is morally neutral, and that any morality would be in its application. But I’m not a pharmacist, so I might not understand the nuances of the profession. But the Pope certainly doesn’t have any more right to be taken seriously on the topic than I do.
Benedict said conscientious objector status would “enable them not to collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes such as, for example, abortion or euthanasia.”
What about products that have multiple uses? Should we stop selling coathangers once the Pope gets his way?
Now, in theory it might be okay for a pharmacist to step away from filling a prescription for a patient if they find the prescription immoral, but only if there is someone else on hand to fill that prescription. It is not okay to discriminate which patients receive service: when you are in health care, it’s not okay to let your personal objections put patients at risk.
And the sooner we can get over the idea that something is credible just because the Pope said it, the better.
Also, his mention of the “ethical implications” of EC suggests a misunderstanding of what EC does. Though of course I guess he’s against contraception in general. Still, I think you make a couple of very important points: that it simply is not acceptable for pharmacists to decide which patients receive service; and it’s certainly not the Pope’s place to be making those decisions.
Grrrrrrrrr.
[...] Posted by Evil Bender in Morality, reproductive rights, wingnuts. trackback When I wrote about how destructive it would be if doctors followed the lead of pharmacists who refuse to prescribe medi…, what I wrote should have been hyperbole. Surely, in a sane world, doctors would not refuse to [...]