For those of you who watched
Boston Legal last night, you know what I'm talking about. For those who didn't, well, you missed some real fun.
You had James Spader fighting a case that the law was totally against him on, and when he confesses these problems to William Shatner, Shatner tells him, "When you're near the end, and it looks like you've lost it, make it look like you've won....I mean, after all, look how well it works for our President."
Beautiful. Of course, one of my pet issues was the focus of the story too, adding some real spice to dessert.
More after the jump....
The main storyline involved a teenage girl who was raped and beaten unconscious, taken to a Catholic hospital, where she was denied the morning-after pill and held until three days had passed, too late for her to take it. The girl is opposed to abortion, but is scared of carrying to term the offspring of her attacker. She wants to sue.
The post I wrote on this issue last year at my blog gained me attention over at C&L and The Regular Schtaple. Here it is:
This morning's Washington Post has a very important story for those who are either pro-choice or like me, who believe in just a few small limits, which I described here (It's a sad world...).
Pharmacists are growing a new category, the pro-life fundies who believe life begins at conception, so they are an accessory to murder by filling birth control pills or the Plan B pill (morning-after). This is far-right extremism, and already some states are capitulating by considering bills or passing bills that protect, are you ready, the pharmacist's rights.
Okay, pharmacist violates right of patient to have prescription filled, and the pharmacist needs protection? What about the right of the patient? A young woman who had an accident during sex with her boyfriend, or who's been raped, can't get her Plan B filled because of some ignorant, moralizing, jackass who wants to stand there and preach to someone who right now is scared as hell. Again, I ask, where is the morality in that?
And, yes, you're right if you said I was about to quote Scripture. John 8:3-7, "The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" 6They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."
I highly doubt these pharmacists lead perfect lives, for only God and Jesus Christ are perfect. Since that is the case, they have no place and no right to preach to other women, women who are single, married, divorced, widowed, women who hold different religious beliefs, women who may simply have made a mistake or women who were attacked.
This is a disastrous mixture of church and state. The state regulates pharmacies. If the state gives protection to pharmacists that do not carry out their state-regulated duties, then the state is sanctioning religious beliefs. That is wrong, it is unconstitutional, and it violates the civil rights of millions of women from having a legal, doctor-written, presecription for their reproductive help. It takes 72 hours for conception to fully take place. Not filling birth control prescriptions is morally disingenuous and it's disgusting. If you are state-certified, then your religious beliefs stop at the door to your professional office.
Not performing abortions is one thing. That's a specialty, and you can avoid doing that. But birth control, the morning-after pill, and counseling about family planning isn't taking any life. These moralizing people, I'm sure, are having sex on a regular basis. Statistically, it's quite likely. So, again, like the Pharisees of old, they are hypocrites through and through. I'm tired of this evangelical religious perversion. It distorts what Jesus Christ stood for. It's Old Testament belief with Jesus Christ stamped on it, and it's destroying what makes America the best nation on Earth.
My favorite parts from the trial were Julie Bowen questioning an OB/GYN specialist who testified up to 700,000 abortions a year could be stopped with better availability of the morning-after pill. I bet that made some wingnuts uncomfortable. Life is not a cell. A fetus could be argued as a life, but not a cell. So, because of intrasigence over a cell, 700,000 lives are being ended. I mean, isn't abortion the thing we want to avoid more?
The second part reused a West Wing segment, in part, when Candice Bergen questioned the Catholic doctor using quotes from Scripture, and watching him trying to distinguish conservative from fundamentalist. Really, in America today, is there a difference?
The girl won, by the way. $100,000 in compensation, $2.6 million in punitives.