On a regular basis, I don’t go out looking for things to get completely pissed off about. I’m normally a very happy and content cynic, but lately ridiculous situations seem to keep popping up that warrant some outcry on my part. I was half-asleep with CNN droning on in the background, when just as I was about to enter that wonderful state of REM, I was jolted awake by the story of an asshole in Ohio.
Apparently this asshole works for Walgreens filling pills in the pharmacy. He was hired to read prescriptions and fill pills. He takes home a paycheck from Walgreens for reading prescriptions and filling pills, and his job duties are clearly to read prescriptions and fill pills. However, on one particular day, he read a prescription and refused to fill pills. Walgreens told him that since it was his job, he was going to have to do it or think about pursuing a career outside of the Walgreens family. He is now suing them, because he refused to do his job.
If this situation isn’t enough to make you bang your head against the wall, let me take this opportunity to really make your blood boil. The prescription he refused to fill was for emergency contraception that a young woman brought into a corporate pharmacy to avoid the bullshit. He believes it is against his religion to fill her prescription, because her taking a pill is tantamount to abortion, and by giving her the pills, he is essentially participating in killing her unborn child. I used to laugh when the college dropouts at my shitty, high school, burger job used to take their positions too seriously, and now their equivalent at the pharmacy is actually suing his employer.
Walgreens offered the asshole a job in neighboring Michigan, but he refused to take it. Pat Robertson is now involved, and helping the man with legal expenses and council, and filed a complaint with the EEOC on behalf of this asshole. I guess it’s fitting that one fundamentalist asshole help a fellow fundamentalist asshole, but this story is one of a rash that I’ve been hearing about lately.
When did pharmacy assistants become moral activists? They do some 18 month course at a trade school, and all of the sudden they are in a position to tell grown, educated women how to run their lives? I don’t fucking think so. This asshole in Ohio’s job is to read prescriptions and fill pills, if he can’t do that then he needs to quit, end of story. Let’s apply the same situation in a different sort of way. I’m a waitress at a steakhouse and I see some 400 lb. guy squeeze his enormous ass into a booth and order the 20 oz. prime rib, loaded baked potato, and a Diet Coke, because they always order the Diet Coke. I go to my manager and tell him that I refuse to give the portly patron his red meat order, because it is against my religion to aid someone in committing a slow, cholesterol-driven suicide.
Do you think Pat Robertson and his band of brothers at the 700 Club would be hiring lawyers for me? I think the crazy, old goat would probably tell me that I was out of line, and that when a man tells me to put a meal in front of him, I should move my girly tushy quickly and get him his chow.
I’m getting really, very sick of those who feel they are more moral then me trying to make my life difficult in order to make themselves feel like they are doing the work of Jesus. I can’t take the pill, because the hormones fuck me up. Jeff and I don’t want anymore children in the near future, because I’m happy working, he just started a business, and one toddler is already a handful. In the event that we have an oops, as two educated, responsible people who have made calculated decisions about their lives, we don’t want to have to drive to a dozen pharmacies trying to get a prescription filled, because someone who didn’t even go to college feels like they might sin by doing what they were hired and paid to do.
I’m waiting enthusiastically to see all the ways the Walgreens corporate lawyers can tear this guy and his 700 Club attorneys new assholes. It seems kind of funny to me that the right-wingers are always talking about how terrible frivolous lawsuits are and how we need tort reform, then they bring this kind of shit into the picture. It must be different when it’s your senseless bullshit you are trying to force down the throats of others.
The most valuable thing I’ve learned from this is to always patronize the pharmacies up on Capitol Hill and the U-District, because they will fill anything, avoid giving money to Christian charities of any kind, because they are using it for evil not good, and stop trying to fall asleep to CNN, because you’ll just end up wide awake and extremely pissed off.
2 comments:
Christian charities aren't all bad, I promise. I know it seems like that because the loudmouth, ubertraditional, closeminded ones get all of the attention. But, a few of us are doing good work. Some of us are even pro-choice and in favor of the morning-after pill, and would take it ourselves. We are not all Pat Robertson.
Moral activists spreading their word through a secular job is not only annoying, it violates a person's right to make choices for themselves- and I consider actions like refusing to fill a prescription based on religious beliefs to be discriminatory.
My most recent personal victim of boycotting is Target, because they had a similar situation occur- dude refused to give out a morning-after pill (which, hello, is NOT abortion, because it prevents the conception from even HAPPENING in the first place), and Target supported his decision.
They said well, whatever. That's up to him. Supposedly this is the same policy as many other retailers enacted concerning Plan B (Walgreens included), but quite frankly, I think that if a pharmacist is going to pick and choose what they want to dispense- even if they're told to send the patient elsewhere in the event that they decline to fill something- they shouldn't be pharmacists. Either do your job...or don't.
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