Friday, August 22, 2008

Offensive

From Slate.com:
The W[ashington]P[ost] fronts news that the Bush administration yesterday announced its plans to implement a regulation that allows federal health officials to yank funding from any health-care providers that don't allow employees to refuse services offensive to their personal beliefs.

Give 'em hell, Georgie! It's high time medical professionals had the latitude to decide who deserves their services and who doesn't. It was just another sign of creeping socialism to expect doctors, nurses, physicians' assistants, pharmacists, orderlies, and hospital janitors to meet the health care needs of just anyone for just any reason. You call that freedom? Now they can pick and choose whose appendix is inoffensive enough to remove, whose broken leg doesn't gross them out, and with whose prescription they are philosophically in agreement.

If only this groundbreaking policy were the model for other important matters of conscience in our free enterprise system. Police officers and firefighters shouldn't have to have to answer calls for their help if they find the caller or the reason for the call personally disagreeable. Sanitation workers and recyclers shouldn't have to collect the contents of the bins on my curb if they are offended by the stuff I throw out. My kid's math teacher should just skip the unit on right triangles if he finds the Pythagorean Theorem personally repugnant.

No comments: