Back in late 2002 my friend Alana and I were chatting (via ICU instant messenger magic of the early aughts) about writing. I was wanting to do more creative writing but I was struggling to do it. She told me about this new online journaling thing people were doing called Blogging. She suggested that maybe a new format with an audience as big or as small as the growing internet might inspire me. She helped me set up my first blog which was probably on Blogger or some other very generic easy template sort of program. This was the beginning of a very important part of my life. I didn’t know it at the time. That seems to always be the way, right? We only know that a time period is important in retrospect. A whole new world of bloggers opened up to me. It was a pretty small world back then and I was blessed with finding some really amazing people during what we now amusingly call The Golden Age of Blogging. What I was hoping for happened, though not in exactly the way I thought it would, but nonetheless…I started writing. Writing on a regular basis. I met other writer in the blogging world. I made friends in the blogging world. Good friends. People I went on to meet in real life and am blessed to still be friends with to this day. Alana always encouraged me to keep on writing. She was an early participant in my yearly writing adventure every October (Writober). When she was doing stand up we’d sometimes write jokes together either though IM or email. She always had positive suggestions for me when I would get frustrated with myself for my chronic procrastination. If those didn’t help she would make fun of me in the best possible way so that I would laugh and stop taking it all so damn seriously. There were years when she would do tarot readings for me over the phone and I swear every single time I would ask some question about what I should be doing or if it was time to change jobs or how I could solve money problems it would always end up right back at Alana saying, “yeeeeaaahh ya know it seems like you should be writing”. Over the years, Alana and I discussed everything at some point or other. We talked about relationships, sex, politics, staying flexible both physically and emotionally, annoying co-workers, cats, puppy dog noses, and writing.
When Alana got diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer two years ago I felt my heart break. But, as Patrick Rothfuss wrote, “broken isn’t shattered.”
Last Monday it became clear that Alana had fought all she could and was slowly leaving her body. That same day I got a notice from a professional writer that that I am fond of that she was teaching an online novel writing class. I’ve never taken a writing class of any kind. Not even in college, though heaven knows I should have. I clicked over to the website for the class and read about how the whole thing worked, only 8 people in a class, 8 weeks long, must submit writing twice over the 8 weeks for crit and must do crit for other classmates writing. I clicked to her specific class and saw it was starting THAT DAY…and there were two spots open.
I thought about Alana. About how she spent the last two years fighting that fucking disease and doing it with so much humor and grace and creativity. She made a goddamned short film in the last year that is currently showing up in film festivals all over the country, while fighting fucking cancer. I knew if I could ask her about taking the class she would have said, “Yes, you should…right now.” So I paid the money and signed up.
At 7:20 this morning my sweet funny friend Alana left this world.
Her name will be forever carved into my heart.
And I am writing.
You Won’t Like It When It’s Turned On You
So the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced the “Formation of a new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR).”
The following can be found on the HHS’s website:
OCR Director Severino said, “Laws protecting religious freedom and conscience rights are just empty words on paper if they aren’t enforced. No one should be forced to choose between helping sick people and living by one’s deepest moral or religious convictions, and the new division will help guarantee that victims of unlawful discrimination find justice. For too long, governments big and small have treated conscience claims with hostility instead of protection, but change is coming and it begins here and now.”
I’m putting up that whole quote so you can see the context of how this is all being presented. For anyone interested in protecting the Civil Rights of Americans this sounds like a good thing right? And honestly I don’t think anyone should be forced to do anything that is truly counter to their “deepest moral or religious convictions”.
But, if your job is to provide medical treatment to other human beings and there are specific people and situations wherein you are going to experience a direct conflict between providing that medical treatment and your “deepest moral or religious convictions” then at the VERY least that limits you as a health care provider.
It seems to me that this Federal Protection means that an employer of medical personnel should now also be protected in the process of researching whether or not any potential employees have particular deeply held moral or religious beliefs that will cause them to be unable to do the job they are hired to do. But protection for the employer does not seem to exist anywhere in this new concept of protecting religious freedom to have a job and simply refuse to do the work you’ve been hired to do. I’m wondering if this mean Christian Scientists can now get jobs as licensed Medical Doctors and refuse to provide any kind of medical treatment other than prayer? Will insurance groups be forced to include those Doctors in their coverage? Will medical groups be forced to include them in their groups without knowing that is the “care” they provide? This really does bring up some question?
Now everyone in favor of this idea is being very careful to make sure that they are not excluding anyone who might have “…deepest held moral or religious convictions”…because you know, they are really interested in making sure no one is discriminated against as a result of their religion as promised in the Constitution. But at the end of the day this is about a very specific group of Christians who want to use their “moral or religious convictions” to punish specific people for either just existing or for having a need for a specific treatment that they think is bad AND wanting Government protection to inflict their morality on others. Flat out, this is about people using their religion to manifest their personal judgement on others in the most public way they possibly can so as to bring attention to their noble stand against this…well let’s be honest, they view it as sin…their noble stand against sin. Of course they don’t seem to mind if their noble stand against sin causes someone’s death…especially if the person who dies is a woman and/or a trans person. That’s just fine with them at the end of the day. That apparently is not a sin or at least not a sin that bothers them all that much.
This protection also means they could declare this same need to refuse to provide services/care/emergency medical treatment to any number of people based simply on their declaration that they have “…deepest held moral or religious convictions” that are in conflict with providing those services. You know…black people, brown people, Muslim people, people they think are sexually deviant or promiscuous, people who are Catholic, people who are Protestant, people who are Jewish, people who have no religious faith at all, people who treated them like shit in high school and will now pay like a motherfucker. You get the picture right?
Here’s another possible example:
What if I am a practicing Pagan? I participate in my religious community. I have a personal practice of faith that informs my daily life. I have many deeply held moral and religious convictions based on the breadth and depth and history of my religion. I am also a paramedic. I am called to an accident site. Bad auto accident. People are hurt, bleeding, in danger of not surviving. One of them is clearly a Christian. Wearing a cross and reciting Christian prayers. I have a deeply held moral and religious conviction that Christians are the source of all evil because historically Christians have hunted, tortured and killed thousands upon thousands of Pagans. Now in the U.S. I am VERY likely to encounter Christians in the course of my work. But according to this HHS Division I should be protected from any form of discrimination as a result of this rather large limitation on my willingness to perform my job duties. It seems that my employer should not be able to ask me about this possibility, if my employer finds out about my “deepest held moral or religious convictions” they cannot negatively impact my employment in any way whatsoever without serious consequences because this would be violating my civil rights. All while that Christian person dies on the ground because critical moments were lost in getting that person treatment due to my “deepest held moral or religious convictions”.
So I stated above that I didn’t think that anyone would should be forced to perform any sort of action that is truly in conflict with their deepest held moral or religious convictions. I stand by that, no one should be forced to violate their deepest held convictions. I also think that if you have caveats about who you are willing to provide legal health services to then you should change your career. Flat out. Medicine is not the job for you. If your “deepest held moral and religious convictions” are more important than being a healer then get the fuck out of Medicine.
Don’t like that answer…tough shit.
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Filed under Essays - Non-Fiction, Political Commentary