Saturday, April 11, 2009

You can't treat a patient if they're gay?

There's a commercial about to run from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), talking about the dangers of gay marriage.

In one part, a woman says "I’m a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job."

I'm still trying to figure out why a "California Doctor" has to choose between their faith and their job if gay marriage is legal.

Do you not treat a patient's broken leg if they got gay married? Or perhaps you're a gynecologist and you determine it's against your faith to give a gay married woman a pap smear? Perhaps a surgeon decides that hey, this gay man with a husband doesn't deserve to have his appendix taken out - obviously it's God's will that they came down with appendicitis.

Seriously here - why would someone either a) being gay, or b) being gay and being married to their partner in any way make a medical professional have to decide between their faith and their job?

"Nurse, fetch me the paddles - this man is in cardiac arrest!"

"Doctor, I can't - he has 'the gay', so it's against my faith to save his life! Jesus would want me to let them die!"

"Oh, well, if that's the reasoning, then I guess OK."

I'm missing something here.

6 comments:

mfoley said...

I can't be sure, but they're probably talking about how if you publicly support banning gay marriage, or give money to organizations that try to ban it, there have been cases where people stopped coming to you and giving you money for your services. I do know there was a huge furor over this a few months ago, when a lot of this happened after prop 8 passed. Apparently, many of these people didn't realize that they might actually have to be inconvenienced by consequences for their actions. I think that some of them even tried saying that listing organizations and people who did donate money to pro-prop 8 organizations (publicly available information) should be illegal, but I can't swear to that.

Unknown said...

It's a shame Prop 8 passed, but I wouldn't be so cavalier about the coordinated attack on its supporters. "Public" information being available to a dedicated researcher digging in state records and a mass-distributed hitlist made possible by Google Maps are very different things. However wrong Prop 8's supporters may be, they're still private citizens, entitled to their own opinions, without being subject to a digital lynching. It wasn't just an "inconvenience", it was scary.

John Hummel said...

I'm not sure the commercial is talking about any kind of digital stalking of Prop 8 supporters - as best I've been able to piece together, some CA doctor didn't want to help a lesbian with in-vitro fertilization purely because of her sexual preference.

Which in my opinion is rather silly. If you don't mind helping a single mother get knocked up via turkey baster, then a lesbian one isn't any worse.

James said...

First of all, that was NOT a CA doctor; that was an actor.

Second of all, this organization has the objective of opposing Same Sex Marriage, and they don't worry about little things like logic and honesty. Don't try to understand what they mean; there is no logic in their ad, only fear mongering.

PS: regarding your comment, John... It's sexual orientation, not sexual preference. I prefer chocolate ice cream, but I'll happily settle for vanilla if we're out of chocolate. I don't "prefer" men; it's my orientation.

John Hummel said...

@James: You are correct on it being orientation, not preference. I erred in my writing, and I'll make a strikethrough correction. Thanks for noticing that.

John Hummel said...

@James: OK, so I can't make the correction - but you're still right ;). Sorry about that.