The Arizona Daily Star has an interesting article about religious accommodations in the work place, and we thought it brought up some interesting questions about customer service. For example, recently in Minnesota a few Muslim cashiers at Target were unwilling to ring up pork products, causing a bit of dust up in the local media and resulting in the cashiers being reassigned to other duties. Walgreens policy allows pharmacists to refuse to fill certain prescriptions on religious grounds. From the Arizona Daily Star:
The law on this is Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination in the workplace. It requires employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for an employee’s religious beliefs — “reasonable” being anything that doesn’t create an “undue hardship” on the employer or on co-workers.
We think it’s great and wonderful and amazing that companies make these accommodations, but retailers should probably make sure there’s at least one friendly atheistic heathen-type cashier available at all times. Otherwise, at which register would we buy that gun that shoots pork-based birth control? —MEGHANN MARCO
Religion on the job: Legacy of Puritans resonates today [Arizona Daily Star]
(Photo: cmorran123)
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“Muslims cannot even TOUCH pork as it is almost blasphemy – yes, to even touch it!”
Well, that would be fine and dandy if I was handing them a huge slab of bacon or something. But – at least I assume so – the pork was covered in some kind of package, right? Thus – theyre not touching pork, theyre touching pork covered in plastic.
I got fired from my job at a tittie bar because I wouldn’t take off my burqa.
@wreckingcru: “On the other hand, Christians can touch and be in the presence of birth-control pills.”
Some Christians — typically the ones who won’t give out birth control — believe that birth control is more or less murder. But more to the point, that giving someone birth control endangers their immortal soul and damns them to an eternity of hell.
So I think asking someone to participate in an action that damns them to eternal tormet IS asking quite a bit.
“Christians” is an overbroad category for this discussion, since beliefs about birth control (and being in the presence of it) vary quite a bit by denomination.
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As y’all may or may not be aware, there is a dire shortage of pharmacists in most areas. So if your store can get its hands on a pharmacist that refuses to fill birth control prescriptions, you’re looking at being able to keep your pharmacy open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week instead of 9 to 5 on weekdays, and a pharmacist who will fill 95% of prescriptions with no problem. Regardless of the handful of customers who will storm out in a huff and never shop there again because your pharmacist refused to fill their Rx, you’re going to be nearly doubling your pharmacy business. That handful of customers will barely make a dent against your increased business.
Secondly, pharmacists are medical professionals, not “mere” employees of the store or mechanical dispensing machines. In theory they exercise their judgment about your medication and provide the final line of defense against deadly drug interactions. Because they are expected to exercise their judgment and are open to malpractice lawsuits if they fail to do so appropriately, they are, like doctors, allowed a fair amount of leeway professionally in choosing what is and is not within the realm of their professional conscience.
Given that pharmacists are expensive and in short supply and MOST prescriptions are very everyday, standardized sorts of things, perhaps the solution is not to jump down pharmacists throats for exercising their consciences but to go forward with the pharmacy “vending machines” that have been tested in several places, that are particularly well-suited to prepackaged medicine like birth control.
As most of you claim to be offended by these religious pharmacists “imposing” their beliefs on you and believe they are deliberately out to pick a fight about it, I’m interested to see how many of you want to pick a fight right back instead of looking for creative solutions to avoid the problem.
Just because you say “I’m right, you’re wrong, you foolish believers” rather than “I’m right, you’re wrong, God said so” doesn’t make you any less guilty of divisiveness or us-and-them thinking than the self-righteous Christians you’re criticizing. ‘Ware lest you become that which you abhor.
@El_Fez: “But – at least I assume so – the pork was covered in some kind of package, right? Thus – theyre not touching pork, theyre touching pork covered in plastic.”
Don’t you think that’s a little sophistic? “Oh, I didn’t RELEASE the deadly anthrax disease, I just GAVE it to the guy who released it.” If pork is the problem, covering it in plastic hardly makes it less problematic. “I didn’t grab her BREAST — I grabbed her breast COVERED BY A SHIRT. It wasn’t groping at all!”
I say just lie to them – tell them the pork is tofo, say the the birth control is for an experiment, and don’t tell them what’s in your bags.
@Eyebrows McGee: While I understand the argument that a pharmacist is trained to advise patients on medical interactions and make judgment calls, there are two things wrong with the argument that not dispensing birth control is just a medical judgment call. The first is that many of the people dispensing medications, of the pre-packaged variety, at pharmacies are not licensed pharmacists. They are retail employees trained to work behind the counter. The only real pharmacists are the ones in the back counting pills and approving prescriptions, and those are not the ones ringing up your Plan B and birth control pills. Both of those products come pre-packaged and don’t require a licensed pharmacist to dispense them. Second, I understand physicians who make ethical calls about things like birth control, and I have no issue with that as patients generally choose their doctors. If I was looking for a doctor I would ensure I didn’t go to one who believes birth control is murder, because that doesn’t jibe with my beliefs. When you go to a pharmacy, however, you are not in the position to choose who will fill your prescription. Most importantly, a pharmacist is surely qualified to reject a prescription because they believe it will cause a dire interaction with another medication, and cause harm to the patient. They are not, however, allowed to refuse to fill a valid prescription when no evidence of harm to the patient is present. My pharmacist is not writing my prescription, he or she is not in the position to determine the best course of treatment for me. My doctor is. The pharmacist is only necessary to ensure that the course of treatment prescribed by the doctor will not in any way interfere with other medications currently prescribed to the patient.
@kerry:
Excellent points — well put!
(Although Eyebrows McGee is one of my favorite commenters, I have to disagree with her on this — Kerry’s comment sums up the reasons very well).
@OnoSideboard: I also don’t know if they’re still owned by these people, but owners of Chick-Fil-A are dominionist/Fundamentalist Christians who’ve been known to contribute heavily towards groups and individuals who push Fundamentalist Christian agendas into government. The owner of Domino’s Pizza used to be a Fundamentalist Christian until he sold off his share.
@synergy:
Yeah, wasn’t there a whole Seinfeld episode about pizza and being pro-choice?
@kerry: It’s an entirely different issue with pharmacy techs, who aren’t liable for malpractice and, as you say, are basically retail employees with special training.
I would make the point again, however, that these are ECONOMIC decisions the companies are making, not moral ones. As long as there is a shortage of pharmacists and pharmacy techs, they’re going to hire whoever they can get and cater to their whims. The businesses in question aren’t making MORAL decisions — they’re making economic ones. And frankly if I ran a pharmacy and I could get pharmacy techs who weren’t a pain in the ass about dispensing legal medications that I choose to sell, that’s who I would hire. But if I’m taking whoever I can get, I’m going to take whoever I can get and put up with their pain-in-the-ass-ness until market demand eases up.
I have two degrees in Christian theology, I teach ethics at the college level, and I have NO PROBLEM with either birth control or Plan B. If I were the pharmacist, I’d be dispensing. And it annoys me and I think they’re theologically wrong when Christian pharmacists choose not to.
But I think it goes to a REALLY DANGEROUS PLACE when we start demanding people violate their deeply-held religious beliefs in favor of our convenience, or economics, or whatever. I’ve noticed this as a growing trend, people being hugely offended that private employers opt to accommodate the religious beliefs of their employees even if it inconveniences some customers. The theory of the free market is that those people will find somewhere that provides them the services they want in the way they want, or will fill the niche and open their own place. I don’t understand why suddenly the answer is that religion is verboten and offensive rather than that the market should provide alternatives if alternatives are needed. I also don’t like this implied idea that religious individuals who take religious seriously should absent themselves from public life entirely because they can’t participate in every action of modern American society.
Finally, I’m quite hesitant to DEMAND pharmacists should dispense anything, regardless of its legality. Pharmacists make most of the reports to the FDA about drug side effects and interactions; there were a lot of pharmacists who knew about problems with, say, Ambien before they became “official.” A lot of pharmacists counseling against Vioxx before that was official. Questions of medical morality and immorality are inherently tied up in questions of efficacy of treatment, and I don’t think we can detangle them by fiat.
I also think there are an awful lot of unaddressed moral and ethical questions surrounded reproductive technology in this country (not necessarily birth control, but other technologies), and to shout, WE HAVE A SOCIETAL CONSENSUS! YOU MUST OBEY! when we haven’t even had a societal DISCUSSION on the topic is scary. The current ethos in medicine of “if we can do it, we should do it” is ethically terrifying, and it depends on individuals to stand up to it.
But what troubles me most about the entire discussion is the absolute refusal of so many people to TRY to understand the thinking of the people on “the other side.” The discussion seems to go, “I disagree with their decision, therefore their reasons are dumb.” People have GOOD REASONS they refuse to dispense birth control — Reasons I happen to think are wrong and misguided — but GOOD REASONS, and insisting they obey without understanding why they object is totally counterproductive, particularly when there’s a shortage of pharmacists.
There are solutions to the problem that can satisfy both sides. But not so long as either side is screaming, “YOU MUST DO IT MY WAY!”
And in American ethical tradition, we’re a lot more concerned with society oppressing an individual and silencing his beliefs or actions — and that is VERY MUCH what is going on here, which should make EVERY Constitution-Believing American pause and take stock regardless of his or her position on the issues in question. This concept that an individual can oppress society is slightly loopy, particularly given our legal structures meant to protect the rights of individuals to act against the grain of society.
But if you have that big a problem with it, go to pharmacy school. Or start a drugstore and hire pharmacists who agree with your ethics. The right answer isn’t to run roughshod over OTHERS’ moral or religious beliefs, nor to shut them out of public life, regardless of how misguided those beliefs might be.
(And yes, I lived four years with the inconvenience of getting my birth control far, far away because my pharmacy didn’t dispense. I still object to insisting others violating their religious beliefs because their religious beliefs make your shopping experience inconvenient. But then maybe that’s because I’m a lot more concerned about moral rights of individuals than I am about convenience of consumers.)
@ptkdude: point of clarification… RU-486 (mifepristone) is not the same thing as Plan B emergency contraception (levonorgestrel). IIRC, the former is only dispensed by physicians.
Both were approved by the FDA and were in the news at roughly the same time, which I think explains why many people get them confused.
Eyebrows, I get what you’re saying and agree to a point (namely that, while it’d certainly make my own life far happier and more comfortable if such religious people removed themselves from society, it’s not fair to ask them to do so), but nobody held a gun to those pharmacists heads and told them they had to go be pharmacists. Nobody told the Muslim cashiers they had to be cashiers. They chose the profession/job and should be held accountable for all the requirements of the job, not just most of them. Conservative Christians aren’t being pushed through pharmacy school to be pharmacists (well, they might, but I doubt it). And in pharmacy school, I’m pretty sure they were warned they would have to dispense birth control. I feel that, by continuing their degree, graduating, and finding employment as a pharmacist, they are agreeing to fulfill the duties of a pharmacist; if they had strong moral objections to any part of it, they should have chosen a new career path before they’d washed so much cash down the tubes in pharmacy school. Same basic concept for the cashiers. A simple walk through a grocery store will show you if it sells something you are incapable of handling, like pork, and a logical, sensible person doesn’t then say “Well, they’ll make an exception for me!” They go and find a job in a better-suited environment.
Love the non ranting argument about differences. Congratulations Eyebrows McGee, Kerry, and Her Grace. Since I have mixed emotions about this issue, this has been helpful in moving me along to an actual opinion!
wait, i’ve got an easy fix here. if you go into a store & someone refuses to ring an item up based on their belief structure, you get it for FREE!
I as well get really mad and upset when I hear about things like this. It wasn’t very long ago that the Planned Parenthood organization was getting people to sign petitions against store employees refusing to sell birth control to people with valid prescriptions (to which I gladly signed.) If this rule of not filling a prescription out of religious beliefs must remain in place there absolutely must be someone there who is willing to fill it! Having the customer walk out of the store without their medication should not be tolerated under these circumstances. The same thing should be applied to the refusal to ring up pork or drive a customer for having alcohol in their possession. I’d be curious to find out if there have been any court case’s related to exactly this type of issue and what their outcomes were. In this country we are all given the right to freedom of religion but what about freedom FROM religion? No one should be allowed to force their religious beliefs on another person under any circumstances. By doing so they are basically trying to take away a persons freedom to choose their own religion (or lack of religion) These products/services are available and freely sold all over the country and have been that way for a long time. That’s never going to change and regardless of a persons beliefs they need to accept this. So how can anyone feel like it’s their place to change that? I find things to more then a little scary in this day and age, it seems there are more religious people trying to impose their beliefs on others then ever before. After all, there was a period of time when every religion out there was persecuted and looked down upon by the general population. So now we have some of the same groups that were oppressed back then with some (but not all) members who attempt to impose and oppress other people with different beliefs then their own. How disturbing…
Hey, if you have a religious objection to putting out fires, that’s fine. But don’t take a job as a fireman!
Same goes for anyone doing jobs their religion prevents them from doing properly or fully.