Category Archives: Political Commentary

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.

Paula Vogel wrote a line in her play Indecent that both stopped my heart and made it soar.  She’s a brilliant writer so it’s not all that surprising but the moment took my breath away with its pithy clarity and bone deep truth.  She wrote a few like that in Indecent but this one keeps running through my head because it never stops being pertinent.  Sholem Asch’s wife is trying to convince him to let a young man produce his play, God of Vengeance.  Sholem has suffered quite a bit at this point as a result of that play and his other works.  The Holocaust has happened and the depth of that personal wound is almost unimaginable from the distance of 2017.  America, the country he became a citizen of many years earlier, is going through one of its less admirable moments involving the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He and his wife are packed and leaving for France.  He declares something along the lines of, “NOW?  You think we should put on a play now?  While Rome is burning.” And his wife, like women throughout all of history, shrugs and says, “Rome is always burning.”

Huh…wow.

Now the reason it keeps running through me is not just because there is witty truth about Rome, if you will.  But because the answer is YES, now is when we put on a play.  Rome will burn regardless, but maybe, just maybe in the midst of the fire we can remind each other who we really are, who we should be and who we can be.

I’m in the middle of reading a New York Times article about Michelle Obama.  It’s titled “To The First Lady, With Love: Four thank-you notes to Michelle Obama, who has spent the past eight years quietly and confidently changing the course of American history.”  I had to stop after reading the first one to write this because with one line it brought me to tears.  Sometimes a writer manages to put something into words that is one of my most deeply held thoughts, hopes, wounds, resentments, and fiercely fought for beliefs.  These words made my heart stutter, made my breath catch and I had to work hard to control the tears because it showed me I am not alone in these thoughts even though I live in a world that insists this belief is not true and worse than that…it’s hateful, it’s sinful, it’s blasphemous, it’s so wrong that in some parts of the world we would most definitely be punished for speaking it out loud possibly killed for it.

But you know what?  Fuck that!

Here’s what connected me to someone I’ve never met today and reminded me that if there is a God…a God that deserves to be called God…then It certainly has no issue with this truth written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Michelle Obama was speaking. I felt protective of her because she was speaking to an America often too quick to read a black woman’s confidence as arrogance, her straightforwardness as entitlement.

She was informal, colloquial, her sentences bookended by the word “see,” a conversational fillip that also strangely felt like a mark of authenticity. She seemed genuine. She was genuine. All over America, black women were still, their eyes watching a form of God, because she represented their image writ large in the world.

There’s a whole lot there but what got me today was the ringing truth that the amazing woman who has been our First Lady for the last eight years is absolutely “a form of God”.

Woman as a form of God, much less black women as a form of God, is an idea that makes the big three Western religions squirm and whine and get very, very angry.  Their efforts to erase women from their rightful place as an equal image of God has unbalanced our society in a way that we may never recover from in my opinion.

Michelle Obama shines one of the brightest lights of fierce, intelligent, powerful, thoughtful womanhood ever to walk the public stage.  She does that as a black woman in the face of intense opposition to both her womanhood and her race and yet she continues to shine.

She continues to show us the face of God.

Some days are harder than others.

Some days everything makes you cry.

Some days it’s impossible to breathe.

Some days I can’t see the way out.

Some days I can barely keep the screams behind my teeth.

Some days I despair for us as a species.

But then I remember my Dad telling me that giving into despair is a cop out.

I remember that I have a responsibility to care for my head and heart and spirit because if I don’t stand up and shine a light in the dark, then I’ve betrayed every good thing in the world.

I remember that we are only as good as the good we do when it’s hard and terrifying, when all we want to do is curl up on the ground and vomit because the horror is beyond imagining.

I remember something I learned in the early days of the AIDS crisis…

SILENCE = DEATH

#BlackLivesMatter