If you don’t like contraceptives, don’t use them. You are allowed to be a cafeteria consumer of health-care services, but it’s really a bad idea for your doctor or insurer or anyone else to filter science through an ideological litmus test.
Worse than that: It is the opposite of medicine.
Medicine is fact-based. It’s practice entails more than science but it is scientific. You may blithely consume the fruits of science (vaccines, for instance) while spurning the knowledge on which they are based, but medicine may not. If it does, it ceases to be medicine.
So I’ll put the case baldly. People are entitled to health care. The whole health care, not some politically correct version of it. Because medicine like science is not a bundle of random factiods, it’s a complete reality-based system.
The public interest in this is both individual and social: to keep costs down and to protect individual rights.
Religious dissenters have rights too. Ted Kennedy’s individual-conscience exemption – the one that Scott Brown continually misstates – is on the money, though I think a Christian Scientist surgeon is a tad oxymoronic.
But the supporters of Blunt, Brown et al. would turn this exemption on its head, from a protection of individual conscience to the imposition of religious dogma into the secular sphere and onto individuals.
You are free to try to convince, but not to compel. Individuals have rights that institutions do not. These corporations are not people, my friends.
Having trouble getting people to follow your particular religious instructions? Your right to swing your episcopal ring ends where someone else’s face, or perhaps I should say other body parts, begins. Hands off.
So please go practice your faith with my secular blessing and that of our society. Be grateful for what we’ve all got, and careful what you wish for. You’d fare a lot worse under a theocratic regime, believe me.
“Because medicine like science is not a bundle of random factiods, it’s a complete reality-based system.” — wow that is completely untrue. If you’ve ever had a serious disease beyond an infection, medicine is much more like a bundle of guesses at an impossibly complex system.
Nobody claimed complete knowledge.
Do you seriously argue that there is some alternative to “science” that does a better job of handling our diseases and disorders?
You have so neatly described the antiscientific world view I am tempted to thank you.
A complete system, as opposed to a fixed body of dogma, contains within it the means to explore new things, resolve conflicts, self-correct, and grow.
That is what makes it a system.
any day.