That “Conscience Rights” regulation from the Department of Health and Human Services Department we all protested last year passed anyway. Fortunately, there appear to be lawsuits already in place against it (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011502059.html?hpid%3Dsec-health&sub=AR) before it officially goes into effect on 1/19/09.
Yanno, I have no objections to people abiding by the tenets of their faith. In fact, I applaud people who have a conscience and I encourage them to consider their consciences in making their career choices. If they feel that they cannot, in good conscience, fulfill all the requirements of their job, then they need to seek another job. It’s not like the requirements are secret and sprung on them only after they’ve completed schooling for the job – they know what the job entails long before they enroll in classes for it. As far as I’m concerned, they should have made their ethical and moral choices when they were deciding what career they wanted to pursue.
If they were truly concerned about their religious consciences, they wouldn’t pursue careers that offered so much opportunity to offend them. They would choose careers that bolstered their consciences. The protest that we would lose health care workers isn’t true. We would only lose the ones who present a clear danger to patients. As negligible as that number is in terms of employees, it’s far too high in terms of risk to patients. I’d rather see them working in fields that will make them happy rather than in fields where they can kill others so easily, simply by doing nothing and beating their breast about how put upon they are.
What I object to are people who deliberately enter career fields that violate the tenets of their faith, then bitch, moan, and refuse to do the work their job requires of them. I object to people who force their faith onto their clients, customers, patrons, patients, and co-workers, causing distress and possibly even death to one or more of the people who depend upon them.
I don’t know about others but personally, I feel anyone who, through deliberate shirking of the duties of their job for any reason whatsoever, causes harm or death to another person is guilty of murder. To bring up ethical and moral objections based upon their personal religious preferences after they are employed in a field they knew would violate their religious tenets is a form of dishonesty that is criminal. I think they should be treated as criminals if any patient comes to harm through their deliberate refusal to provide any health care-related service – murder if the patient dies because of their refusal, and other charges based upon the injuries, pain, and suffering a patient endures because of their refusal to provide the care they were trained to give. Their jobs may be protected under this farce of a regulation, but they should still face the full extent of criminal and civil law for any harm that comes to the people who depend upon them for health care.
I fully support Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and such agencies as the ACLU and Planned Parenthood for bringing lawsuits against the Department of Health and Human Services for promoting a regulation that is detrimental to health and human beings.
The “Conscience Rights” regulation is currently a haven for potential murderers and I find that intolerable in a career field devoted to healing and life.
Ebonypearl 
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