Three questions came to mind this morning when I read the news that the ayatollah of the new American Taliban, Pat Robertson, is funding a group of pharmacists who want to step between you and your doctor.
Here they are:
Is there a more important professional relationship in our lives than the one we maintain with our doctors?
Is the doctor-patient relationship the foundation of modern meical ethics and, if so, how do we protect it ... and ourselves?
If we allow outsiders to intrude on that relationship, what sort of cascading hell are we speeding toward?
I don't have any answers on the jump, but there's plenty here to ponder.
I suppose it was inevitable that we'd soon see pharmacists who have been fired for refusing to do their jobs claiming a non-existent "right of conscience" and taking their troubles to court.
And so it happened Friday.
A gang of four pharmacists who refused to sign a pledge promising to dispense the morning-after birth-control pill and were fired as a result filed suit in Illinois Friday against Walgreen drug stores.
The pharmacists are accusing Walgreen of violating an Illinois law they believe allows them to intrude on the doctor-patient relationship because their beliefs demand it. And just whose money is behind the lawsuits? Why it's Pat Robertson's filthy lucre, presumably borrowed from one of his massive investment funds, from his gullible viewers' pockets or extracted from one of his African diamond mines.
Robertson's front, as always, is his American Center for Law and Justice with Jay Sekulow as his bagman and chief mouthpiece. This group, you will recall, has insinuated itself like a virulent disease into many contentious recent issues, including the Schiavo case, school vouchers, school prayer, Oregon's assisted suicide law and on and on. They are the legal vanguard of the religious right and their goal is to drag you and me under the dark shadow of their narrow religious bigotry and leave us there to fend for ourselves.
At the end of the day, of course, the lawsuit by the four pharmacists will turn on the relatively narrow question of whether the four were illegally fired when they refused an order by Walgreen to sign a pledge promising to follow the law.
But, the larger issues will rule, at least for many of us, and that's why it's past time we all got our heads straight about where we stand on this potential nightmare and proclaim exactly what we're willing to do to back up our beliefs.
For me, it comes down to whether I will stand by and allow a pill-dispenser at my local drug store to intervene in decisions already reached between my doctor and me (quick, tell me the name of your doctor ... now, tell me the name of the pharmacist, any pharmacist, who has filled a prescription for you).
Physicians, we're told, lean heavily on the integrity of the doctor-patient relationship because it's the foundation of their profession. In order to be effective as our medical advocates in an incresingly bewildering system of care delivery, they must recognize and act on their obligations. Their professionalism depends on their adherence to their duty to do what is best for us at every turn. I'll buy all of that and demand that they stand up and make it true all of the time.
Pharmacists, on the other hand, have no such relationship, legally sanctioned or otherwise, with the customers who come to the store they work in simpply to purchase products. It's simple, really: A pharmacist's job should be to sell us the products that have been prescribed for us and are available on their shelves and to never second-guess decisions made in the doctor's office. If my doctor wants to make a pharmacist a party to my medical care and a partner in the decisions we're making, then that pharmacist should be sitting right there providing their best counsel.
To my knowledge, that doesn't happen ... anywhere ... ever.
This issue is neither a political sideshow nor a distraction from bigger political conundrums; it goes to the heart of a fundamental right to privacy we see under assault every day in this country by meddling religionists who insist they have a right to shape lives they have no interest in. That is why we ignore this issue, which is intricately bound up with abortion rights and any number of other similar issues, at our peril.
If we're going to keep our country one every American has a right to enjoy, we're going to need to run the table against these people by defeating them every time they pop up.
What are you willing to do to make it so?