Give them an inch...

...And they'll prove what sick, twisted bastards they are.

(Saw this yesterday at Shakespeare's Sister who saw it at Property of a Lady who saw it at Bitch Ph. D. who saw it at The Stranger, and I see Exit Stage Left has it too.)

I remembering arguing with someone -- could have been Andrew from the now defunct Freedom's Gate -- a while back over whether pharmacists should have the right to refuse to fill legal prescriptions. As you probably have seen, there here have been numerous news stories about pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions based on their religious beliefs and inevitably, the prescriptions that they refuse to fill are for either Emergency Contraception or just plain old birth control pills.

Various legislative bodies have made laws allowing pharmacists to have some sort of "moral" out to allow them to not fill these prescriptions. Various Big Box stores and pharmacy chains have had to come up with policies on the subject (usually allowing the pharmacists to refuse to fill the prescription).

Now imagine for one second, say, a liquor store hiring a Muslim and allowing them to be a clerk who refuses to sell liquor. How about an electric company tolerating an Amish employee who twiddled their thumbs all day? Yeah, that would be ridiculous. They would be told that if they didn't want to do their job, their ass would be fired.

OK, how about a pharmacist who owns the company and refuses to fill these prescriptions? Imagine going to an emergency room with a gunshot wound and finding out it's staffed exclusively with doctors who refuse to give blood transfusions. How big would that lawsuit be? Any chance that the hospital would win? Any chance that this would be tolerated?

But let's get back to heart of the whole "moral" objection. The pharmacists who object say they object because they are "pro life."

So I ask, how is this "pro life"???

Cedar River Clinics, a women's health and abortion provider with facilities in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima, filed a complaint with the Washington State Department of Health this week alleging three instances where pharmacists raising moral objections refused to fill prescriptions for Cedar River clients. The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was "morally unable" to fill a Cedar River patient's prescription for abortion-related antibiotics. Cedar River's complaint quotes its Renton clinic manager's May 17, 2005, e-mail account: "Today, one of our clients asked us to call in her prescription... to Swedish outpatient pharmacy. [We] called the prescription in... and spoke with an efficient staff person who took down the prescription. A few minutes later, this pharmacy person called us back and told us she had found out who we were and she morally was unable to fill the prescription." (Cedar River thinks their client eventually got her prescription filled.)

Yes, the pharmacist was so "pro life" that she didn't care if the woman went septic...or maybe she just had a thing about killing all that poor bacteria. Bacteria has feelings too!

But it gets worse:

The complaint also includes an incident from November 2005 in Yakima, in which a pharmacist at a Safeway reportedly refused to fill a Cedar River patient's prescription for pregnancy-related vitamins. The pharmacist reportedly asked the customer why she had gone to Cedar River Clinics and then told the patient she "didn't need them if she wasn't pregnant."

Yep, you can't get any more "pro life" than refusing to fill a prescription for VITAMINS FOR A PREGNANT WOMAN just because she went to the "wrong" doctor in your eyes.

There is no "War on Christianity" -- just a war on women and the clinics who provide them with legal medical care.