Subscribe to Breaking NewsDaigle: Crisis of Conscience
On Tuesday, the Louisiana House of Representatives will consider HB517, a bill designed to protect health care providers across the state from “liability, discrimination or employment action for refusing to provide certain health care services” according to their conscience.
The original version of the bill was struck down in committee earlier this legislative session for being too broad. Lawmakers went back to the drawing board and crafted a more detailed version of the legislation, and while the changes improved it, the bill still leaves some doors open for serious discrimination against LGBT Louisianians.
The bill protects any “person, employer or entity, whether public or private” from being “held civilly or criminally liable, discriminated against, dismissed, demoted or in any way prejudiced or damaged” for declining to provide or participate in any health care service that violates their conscience.
The bill defines conscience as “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction,” and it also lists some of the practices that would be included under this provision: abortion, dispensation of drugs affecting the reproductive process, artificial insemination, sterilization and physician-assisted suicide.
The real stunner for me is what the bill allows health care workers can refuse to do: “counsel, advise, provide, perform, assist in, refer for, admit for purposes of providing, participate in providing, pay, contract for, or otherwise provide for the payment of, in whole or in part” any service they object to on moral grounds. (Emergency care, however, cannot be declined, according to the bill.)
What does this mean for LGBT Louisianians? A lot. Not only could a health care provider refuse services on the grounds of conscience, they can also refuse to refer that patient to an amenable provider on those grounds as well.
And there’s the rub for many LGBT Louisianians. In a state where moral objection to homosexuality runs neck and neck with moral objection to abortion, we now have to worry that our sexuality might limit our access to the proper health care. A significant portion of our population lives in rural areas, where access to medical care is already sometimes hard to come by. Options for gay men and women across the state are also limited by economic factors: A good percentage of gay men and women in central south Louisiana are middle-class working people, and the option of traveling a few hours for a particular service isn’t necessarily feasible.
For some of us, the mere fact of who we are can mean the difference between proper medical consulting or care and no care at all.
Reproductive freedoms are most in danger with this bill. But its non-specific terms allow for a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription for an HIV medication on moral grounds. A physician could refuse to treat the child of a gay couple. A transgendered person could be refused hormone therapy. A physician could refuse to provide medical services to a person simply on the basis of their sexuality.
This is the disparity between the the rush of progress for our community as a whole and the slow march of progress for gays in the South. We’re still fighting battles that are 20, 30 years old. We’re debating rhetoric that went out of the public debate 15 years ago.
We’re on the ground, though, doing our part here. Our local PFLAG chapter will be gathering a group to protest the bill in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, joined by other groups from across the state. The chapter is only four months old, but they’re raising their collective voice and making their presence known.
What happens to the LGBT community here happens to all of us. And the more times bills like these pass quietly amid the excitement over victories in, say, marriage equality, the further behind we in the South fall.
Our goal is equality for everyone. You don’t have to live here to make a difference for LGBT people who do. For information on HB517 and ways to contact Louisiana state representatives, visit www.legis.state.la.us.
Cody Daigle is the entertainment writer for the Times of Acadiana and a blogger on gay issues for theadvertiser.com.
As Traci suggested:
Conservatives promoting these med bills make the mistake of assuming that strongly held religious and moral convictions always match conservative ideology.
This bill would also protect a health care worker who refused to participate in abstinence only type actions from being fired. It would protect a physician at a religious hospital who refused not to treat a transgendered person. It would protect a medical worker who strongly believed in providing advice/support to potentially gay youths.
It would also protect those who wanted to refuse to recognize the current marriages of those who had been previously divorced. And etc, and etc.
Time to boycott Louisiana. Move conventions elsewhere. Spend your tourist dollars elsewhere. That’s what we have to do to every single state that pulls crap like this.
God sent these people a message, and they still don’t get it at all.
The message was named Katrina.
Which shows how important the electio of PR. OBAMA WAS.
Unless you want the current pope, and the head of the So Baptists, the people who gave us slavery and segregation, sitting on the supreme court.
Or in another vein, might I suggest that the war on religious terrorism needs to be fought here at home.
BTW, Obama can’t do everything we want to do for gay people. But if you simply look at what is happening re marriage, respect for America re-appearing in the world, etc, we should all realize the George W. Bush and his gang are the true, if you are religious, embodiment of Satan himself.
Randy… Obama’s health care REPAIR? Obama isn’t going to do jack crap for us… He has done NOTHING for Gays and Lesbians yet except take our vote, use us to design clothes for his wife and provide comedy for his correspondant’s dinner. Who are you kidding. The problem has always been right wing ideals such as those in Louisiana…The new problem we have to deal with is a leader like Obama who has no intention of doing ANYTHING for us. We were suckers… Time to take care of each other and stop believing in Obama… Haven’t we seen enough? Don’t Ask Don’t Tell…Marriage. Wake UP!
This is horrible. A prohibition against discrimination has no meaning if the fine print says: unless that person really, really believes she should.
If a Doctor wants to refuse to give medical treatment of provide any other medical service because of moral grounds he or she should not be a Doctor in the first place. I just can’t believe this new bullshit from right wings.
This is shocking given that I understood healthcare workers are to ‘do no harm’. Care should be provided, moral issues have no place in a medical environment. Just ask those lawmakers if they sih to see their loved ones being denined care due to vague and ‘ill defined’ moral reservations. Might then, for instance, bigotry and hypocrisy be deemed an acceptable cause of ‘moral reservation’ leading to denial of care?
Perhaps an Achilles heel for those providers who want to discriminate is their medical education. I’m guessing most of them used student loans or attended publicly supported med schools. In doing so, they lost their ability to pick and choose who they will treat and who they won’t. Did these folks declare their objections to certain procedures or classes of patients before they entered the medical field? Did they displace another medical school candidate who would not have discriminated? These are questions I would like to see addressed by the legislatures and the courts.
As a gay teacher from the south, what would happen if I refused to educate children who are known to condemn my lifestyle and profess hatred. It SHOULD be my moral right…shouldn’t it??? Of course I’m being sarcastic…but when the tables are turned it doesn’t look as righteous as the conservatives make it out to look. Also, will they deny treatment to adolescent homosexuals as well? Or will they deny treatment to straight children who’s parents are gay because their families cause uncomfortable feelings in the waiting room? hummmmmmnnnnn?
Think Folks!!!
Our Southern Brothers & Sisters need help!!!
Think hard about targeting some giving specifically in their direction, and SOON.
Community Center Benefits?
Throw one & send the proceeds to Baton Rouge PFLAG.
Tea Dance? Take up a collection.
Of course, anyone down there who can make suggestions for where the money should go for the purpose of defeating this thing, please speak up!!!
All of our boats sit on the surface, and we ALL need to raise that surface!!!
@ Kristie–it hasn’t gone as far as condoms (yet), but I can tell you this crap (restricting access to reproduction-related pharmaceuticals) has been going on in Ohio for the last few years. Other states too.
How is it in 2009 that the United states becomes more and more oppressive??? As a Canadian I take this kind of crap very seriously. I refuse to spend vacation dollars anywhere in the States that relegates my gay and lesbian et al brethren to statuses not befitting a cow. How dare these fools do this to their fellow citizens!!! It is important for us all to write our distaste for this inhumane treatment and allow these lawmakers to see in dollars what they lose by such horrid discrimination. Just because I have the priveledge of being protected from this bigotry does not allow me as a fellow human being to sit back and not do something. All it takes is a three minute email folks. Let’s all stand up together!
Isn’t it cute how they call their intentional inability to do their job “conscience”? I sure hope that such people will not be funded via Obama’s health care repair.
Well, with this bit in the proposed statute, “… dispensation of drugs affecting the reproductive process…”
it seems that physicians could also refuse to write prescriptions for birth control as well and pharmacies could refuse to fill them. Going even further, you could have clerks declining to sell condoms using this as a protection. It’s ridiculous!
Health care providers are not there to make moral judgements about people’s lives and lifestyles. They are there to provide medical care for their patients, period.
Once you start down this slippery slope you’re going to end up sliding down into a crap hole where you have people dying left and right because doctors are now allowed to just forget their oath and only treat people they like and approve of morally. Disgusting!
Wow. This is stunning. I’ve read and written about the “conscious regulation” when it comes to reproductive issues, but denying care altogether…wow. I’m glad PFLAG is working to stop this.