april 13, 2012

i don't see how any thinking person could see denying marriage or denying a prescription as a right. it's not even a question of positive or negative rights or freedom. in both of these cases, the need to ask permission at all - for permission to ingest a drug or to marry somebody - is really a rights breach; the doctor or priest has the choice between standing in the way of something they have no real place standing in the way of or getting out of the way as a legal formality.

my response to something like this would be to make birth control available over the counter and get the state out of marriage altogether (it's a personal contract).

http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Wildrose+favour+conscience+rights/6414747/story.html

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i'm always a civil libertarian.

...except when people act in ways i don't like.

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it would be different if doctors denying prescriptions and priests performing marriages weren't both performing functions of the state. i'll grant you that.

but, as they are, a doctor denying a prescription is equivalent to the state denying it - which is functionally carrying out prohibition. similarly with the priest...

so, because they're not acting in an individual capacity but as state functionaries, enforcing their individual beliefs is equivalent to acting oppressively on behalf of the state; we can argue about whether this is just or not, but, so long as they are functionally state actors, if they wish to act oppressively then they should be fired or otherwise restricted from carrying out their *statist* functions.

what i mean is that a priest that does not wish to marry homosexual couples should not be allowed to legally marry heterosexual couples either because he is not willing to accept the state's legal definition of marriage.

and, yes, of course the state/people/democracy determine what marriage (a civil contract) is, not the church. suggestions to the contrary are so specious as to not be worth entertaining.

the more i think about it, the more i think that the best way forward is to prohibit ordained religious people (priests, pastors, whatever) from having the right to perform legal marriages and restricting legal marriage to a purely secular process. that would allow them to have their sacraments as they want them, and deny whoever they want, but would also force *all* couples to go through a *second* legal ceremony.

ultimately, religious and legal marriages are two different things and should be treated differently under the law.

i guess the difference between the way i see it and the way mainstream american pols see it is that i don't think the solution is to create civil unions and make them secondary to religious marriages, i think it's to throw religious ceremonies out of the secular legal realm and restrict them to purely symbolic/sacramental processes.

i mean, the real problem here is that marriage encroaches religion too far into the state, isn't it?

...and maybe doctors should be forced to sign a contract with the state, just like every other employee does with their employer. that contract would certainly have to deny the employee's rights to act independently in contradiction to the will of the employer. doctors that do not wish to abide by their contractual obligations would have the choice of finding another profession or moving elsewhere.

i can cut a little slack with the marriage thing, but i have no patience for a doctor denying a prescription on religious grounds. that's simply a bad doctor, imo, and one that should be immediately de-licensed.