How The Game Is Played…(continued)
(This was originally posted on Truth Wins Out…)
Actually…I was expecting a bigger pushback then this…
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama’s latest overture to the homosexual community – an executive order directing his Health and Human Services Department to issue new federal rules on hospital visitation and medical decision-making – is a “solution in search of a problem,” one conservative activist said.
CNS, formerly the Conservative News Service, now going as the Cybercast News Service, is an arm of Right Wing activist L. Brent Bozell The Third’s Media Research Center. This is how they report news as it relates to gay and lesbian Americans: They interviewed some heterosexual hospital workers, a chaplain from the right wing Ave Maria School Of Law (Justice Scalia helped develop the school’s curriculum, and Clarence Thomas delivered its first annual Ave Maria Lecture), and Peter Sprigg of the anti-gay Family Research Council…
…all of whom say nobody ever discriminated against the gays to begin with:
The Rev. Michael Orsi, chaplain and research fellow in law and religion at Ave Marie School of Law in Florida, told CNSNews.com that his work with AIDS patients in a New York City hospital in the 1980s impressed upon him the need for sick people to have the support of people who love them.
…
“Whenever someone does a health care proxy, there is no stipulation that the person has to be a spouse of the opposite gender — or a spouse at all,” Orsi said. “So with a health care proxy, you can appoint anyone that you trust to make those decisions. And so there is no law prohibiting that.”
Oh really?
Sprigg, who made hospital visits in his previous work as a pastor, said he’s never known hospitals to interfere with visitors – regardless of whether the visitors were related to the patient or not.
“I just don’t think that this is a very common problem,” he said. “I think ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you just walk into the hospital, you walk into the person’s room. Nobody stops you. People talk about this issue — you would think there is airport level security surrounding hospitals in America. That’s just not true. The idea that you have to present ID or persuade them to let you in is just laughable,” Sprigg added.
Laughable. Actually…I think this is what Peter finds laughable…
Obama Mends Old Wounds Extends Health Care Rights to Gay Partners
President Obama issued a surprise memorandum Thursday night, April 15, calling for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians by hospital visitation policies that limit visitors to immediate family members.
The timing for release of the memo was a little odd—at 7:29 p.m. while the president was onboard Air Force One enroute back to Washington from a day of events in Florida.
After signing the memorandum onboard Air Force One, the president then called Washington State resident Janice Langbehn to express his sympathy for the loss of her partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond.
Pond and Langbehn’s story was the subject of a profile last year in the New York Times, illustrating one of the urgent problems gay couples face because they cannot marry and because some entities still refuse to respect their relationships.
During a family vacation to Miami, Florida, in February 2007, Pond collapse with an aneurysm and was taken by ambulance to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s trauma center. When Langbehn and their three children arrived at the hospital, a hospital social worker said they would not be able to visit Pond, even though Langbehn and Pond had executed a health proxy and Langbehn had a friend fax the document to the hospital.
[Emphasis mine…] Yes…that’s real belly laugh that all right. And…oh look…here’s another moment of lighthearted hospital mirth…
Flanigan v. University of Maryland Hospital System
On October 16, 2000, on a cross-country trip to visit family, Bill Flanigan’s partner Robert Daniel was admitted to the University of Maryland Hospital’s Shock Trauma Center with a serious illness. Despite the fact that Flanigan and Daniel were registered as domestic partners in California and that Flanigan had with him a Power of Attorney to make health care decisions for Daniel, hospital personnel prevented Flanigan from seeing his partner. Hospital staff told Flanigan that only “family” members were permitted to visit and that “partners” did not qualify. Flanigan was unable to consult with doctors or to tell surgeons of Daniel’s wish to forego life-prolonging measures such as a breathing tube. Several hours later, when Flanigan was finally allowed to visit, Daniel was no longer conscious, his eyes were taped shut and doctors had inserted a breathing tube. Daniel never regained consciousness and died three days later.
Daniel was terrified of having a tube stuck down his throat…and guess what happened. And he’d been put into restraints as well, probably because he tried to fight having the tube inserted. Laughable. Laughable.
Both Flanigan and Langbehn suffered the same fate in the courts: both hospitals argued that oh goodness they weren’t discriminating against homosexuals goodness no they were too busy taking care of Daniel and Pond to allow their loved ones into the room at the time and oh goodness it was just coincidence that in the case of Daniel they stopped being busy at the exact moment Daniel’s mother who goodness just happened to be his legal next of kin arrived. And the heterosexual juries bought it because goodness knows doctors need to be able to concentrate on doing their jobs not letting in visitors willy-nilly.
Peter Sprigg, if he was an honest bigot these days like he used to be not all that long ago…
Discussing his opposition to the Uniting American Families Act — “which would allow gay Americans the same right straight Americans have to sponsor a foreign partner for citizenship” — Family Research Council Vice President Peter Sprigg recently offered rhetorical support for exporting gay men and women from America. “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society,” said Sprigg.
…would say that exporting homosexuals from hospitals is a good thing. Take it as a measure of how much the tide has turned against the hate factories that they can’t come right out and say the filthy homos should consider themselves lucky hospitals even treat them, and not turn them over to the police for prosecution under the sodomy laws.
But if you can’t make homosexuality disappear you can at least try to pretend anti-gay discrimination does not exist. And one way you do that is to not talk to any homosexuals about discrimination, in an ersatz news article about anti-gay discrimination.
