Funny how the same people pushing "free market" solutions to the health care crisis in the U.S. are also the same ones pushing these Religious Exemption laws that allow individuals to refuse to give health care regardless of what their employer’s policies are…

Court ruling: Pharmacist can say no to ‘Plan B’

A federal judge’s ruling this week upholds the right of Illinois pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception.

…

Several pharmacists employed by Wal-Mart and Walgreen Co. have been disciplined for either refusing to dispense Plan B or for refusing to promise that they would dispense emergency contraception if asked.

U.S. District Judge Jeanne Scott denied a request Tuesday by Wal-Mart to throw out a lawsuit filed by pharmacist Ethan Vandersand. Scott sided with Vandersand, who had claimed he was legally protected from discipline by the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act when he declined to dispense Plan B.

Vandersand, who lives in Bluffs, formerly worked at the pharmacy in Beardstown’s Wal-Mart. He was put on unpaid leave after he refused to fill a Plan B prescription requested by a nurse practitioner at Springfield’s Planned Parenthood on behalf of a female patient in February 2006.

Wal-Mart had contended the state’s right-of-conscience law doesn’t cover pharmacists. Walgreen Co. has made the same argument in other Illinois lawsuits filed by fired pharmacists.

But Scott wrote in her ruling, "The statute prohibits discrimination against any person for refusing to provide health care because of his conscience."

Emphasis mine.  Note that the law doesn’t limit a person’s right to refuse to give health care to contraception.  It can be health care for Anything, according to this judge.  Picture someone who has AIDS and needs their medication to keep their viral count low.  Picture some religious right bigot behind the counter turning them away because those medications enable homosexuals to escape the consequences of their sin. 

Picture that happening to…hell…just about anyone who isn’t living their lives according to the god of the fundamentalists: who isn’t one of their tribe. 

You need to keep something in focus here.  Take a look back on the history of the rise of the religious right.  Abortion was one of their hooks to get votes and money, when school desegregation wasn’t cutting it anymore.  Then Anita Bryant showed them how much more effective the homosexual boogyman was, and they’ve been running with it ever since.  But this fight has been going on for decades now, and the religious right got involved in politics along with the secular right over school desegregation…and more specifically, loosing their tax exemptions for their segregated private schools.  That’s the mindset here.  You have to keep that in focus.  Abortion…The Homosexual Menace…these are just tools to keep the voters angry.  The real agenda, is dividing America into haves, and have-nots.  Guess which side of that fence you’re on.

These conscientious objector laws are ultimately about building that fence of have, verses have-not.  It isn’t just contraception, and it isn’t just health care.  It’s about building that fence.  Everything is about building that fence.

Because we don’t deserve the American Dream.  This is not our country.  It’s theirs.  We just work here.