You know full well that what I meant by the word "tell" had nothing to do with free speech. I meant the word "tell" in the sense of "force". Such as, "I told you to pick up your room". The first amendment does not give people the right to coerce or force or pressure other people to change their moral convictions.
Somehow I doubt she was ordering the woman to change her religious views in the same sense a mother orders her child to clean his room.
That's a cool opinion you've got there. Do you have anything to back it up or is it just another baseless opinion?
... You're actually asking me to provide a source for the claim that employers expect people to do the job they've been hired to do? Are you
actually going to be that ****ing obtuse?
Going to the media isn't an "actual action"? Are you serious?
Oh for God's sake. Criticizing someone's beliefs publicly is different from withholding medicine to a customer who has a prescription for it based on your personal beliefs. The former is covered under freedom of speech (unless you can show me that the customer was actually trying to force the employee to change her beliefs, because somehow I doubt that's what was going on), the latter has potential negative effects on the customer's health. Don't dodge the point.
I sure bet the pharmacist would have loved it if the customer would have had a backbone and weathered the harshness of being told to go elsewhere
I'm not sure if it's really that easy, but then again I don't know how prescriptions work in the US and UK. Suppose for a moment that this had been a small town with only one pharmacy.
without whining about the persecution and defamation of having someone disagree with them.
Last I heard, she was upset because she
didn't get her medicine, not because the pharmacist disagreed with her.
I'll ask the question again, since many of you seem to feel fine just ignoring it, why should the pharmacist be expected to find another line of work when she can fill out hundreds of thousands of other prescriptions a year? Feel free to just pass this one up.
Well, if you'd read the bottom of my post, I kind of... did. If her religious convictions against birth control are so strong that she can't even pass a damn box of pills to a customer, why is she working in a pharmacy where such a situation is likely to arise? I don't think anyone's saying she should stop being a pharmacist. There are pharmacies in the US that don't stock birth control, she could work at one of those. Hell, maybe she could even tell her employer so they could take measures to ensure such a situation doesn't come up, like having multiple pharmacists on hand. You know, anything aside from "work in a pharmacy that stocks birth control and pray to god nobody ever comes with a prescription for birth control".
We have a pharmacist who feels strongly that contraceptives are a sin.
... working at a pharmacy that stocks contraceptives and being surprised when someone comes in asking for contraceptives.
We have a customer who doesn't mind contraceptives at all.
... who has already gotten a prescription that has been accepted by the pharmacy for medicine that she is taking for her health rather than for birth control.
The pharmacist takes the woman aside and explains that she cannot fill the prescription because of her religious beliefs, and tells the woman how to get the prescription filled.
... a day later, potentially causing health problems for the customer. But it's okay that she didn't do her job and potentially put the customer's health at risk, because she did it
politely.
The customer storms out (her own admission) and criticizes the pharmacist to the worldwide media, specifically singling out her religious belief.
... because it was the employee's religious beliefs that started the whole problem, much the same way that we would single out a murderer's racism if he yelled racial slurs while beating his victim to death.
Can any of you, ANY of you see how the customer is trying to force her belief that contraceptives are fine on the pharmacist?
Is she suing the pharmacist to make her change her beliefs? Is she threatening her if she doesn't change her beliefs? No? Then she is not forcing her belief that contraceptives are fine on the pharmacist. She is disagreeing with the pharmacist's beliefs. Disagreeing very loudly and very publicly is still just disagreeing. To quote Profesco,
Profesco said:
Words versus actions. If the Deely lady forced the pharmacist to use contraception, that's force. Saying "I think you're wrong" is not force.
Oh, and I like how you're ignoring every single analogy we bring up to show how stupid this situation is. I especially like how you quoted mine and
still completely glossed over it. Unless you can explain how this situation is any different from a Hindu refusing to serve a customer beef in a butcher shop, or a Muslim refusing to serve a person their pepperoni pizza, or a Jehovah's Witness working in a hospital refusing to perform a blood transfusion for a patient (inb4 "but the JW scenario is so much more dangerous!"), I will treat them all the same.