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Loading ...Administration plan could discriminate against PWAs, gays
09.30.2008 12:25pm EDT
(Washington) Proposed changes at the Department of Health and Human Services could be used to impede or deny services to HIV-positive patients and members of the LGBT community, two groups have warned.
HHS says the proposed changes are to protect the rights of health care providers who object to abortion on the basis of “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Under the proposal, health care providers receiving federal funds would be required to verify they are not discriminating against those who have such beliefs.Lambda Legal, the National Coalition for LGBT Health, and other health advocacy and medical care groups warn that the proposed regulations are too broad and vague, and may lead grantees to violate other federal or state laws.
That scenario, the groups say in comments submitted to HHS, is great cause for concern.
Anti-LGBT bias remains a problem among health care providers and religious disapproval of gay people can contribute to that, the groups said in their submission to the agency.
Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court ruled that religion cannot be used as a legal excuse for doctors to deny a lesbian fertility treatment. In its unanimous decision, the court made clear that California’s law prohibiting this discrimination must be followed, rejecting the doctors’ claim that they were exempt from the state’s civil rights law because of their fundamentalist Christian beliefs.
The proposed HHS regulations could cause confusion in everything ranging from who receives care to which organizations can receive federal funding, the submission said. In addition, the groups said, the proposal could result in federally funded programs and health care providers inappropriately refusing to treat LGBT and HIV-positive patients in a medically sound, respectful manner.
“Patients with HIV already often face the added stigma of homophobia,” says Bebe Anderson, director of Lambda Legal’s HIV Project.
“These proposed rules address too many separate issues to do anything but create massive confusion. For people with HIV, who could be left open to religiously-based discrimination or harassment, that’s a dangerous prescription.”
These people know they are getting into professions where they are serving the general public. If their individual belief systems are so rigid, they should have pursued theology careers – not PUBLIC health professions. Again, more conservative Republican b.s. People should not have the quality of their lives (or even, their actual lives) endangered by some bigots who think that THEIR religion is more impotrant than the LIFE of the person they have been hired to serve. The more I live, the more I realize just how ignorant, creepy and out of touch with reality so many people who follow organized religion really are.
“just how ignorant, creepy and out of touch with reality so many people who follow organized religion really are.” (quote)
Chris – I agree. But really I learned on 9/11. And it is all the same. I could roast the Catholic church here, but instead I’ll talk about the orthodox Jews, who came out against gay marriage. The very people whose cousins, and even maybe parents shared hitler’s ovens during the holocaust, are joining with the very people who perpetrated hatred against the Jews for a millenia. And hitler used that hatred to gain absolute power in the late 30’s, and the result was world war two.
So, I hope I have just explained that most conservative religions are an abomination before God, whatever their specific beliefs, be they catholic, christian, Jewish, or Muslim.
And yes, I went with my wife to Rosh Hashonah services last evening. So I think I have the right to say what I did. And I can in some ways think about people I never knew, the siblings of my great grand parents who never left eastern Europe. Their names are unknown to any of my living relatives, but any contact with them was, I am told, lost by about 1941.
Creep and out of touch are hardly the words to use. Maybe hypocrits touches on the truth, or should we consider people who hurt other people in the name of their Gods and conservative religions, and those who propagate these vile beliefs, as being in some ways mentally ill.
Health care providers DO NOT have any moral or religious convictions which trump the Hippocratic Oath which they have all theoretically taken. If someone is a bigot, then that person has no right working as a health care provider, because bigotry is itself a mental illness. Another reason to vote for Obama — get rid of the lunatic church in America’s government affairs!
I agree with the posters here…religion is an evil influence and should be outlawed. However, one of you states that it is “consevative” religion and that you went to services last night (I’m assuming of the non-conservative type?).
I just can’t see justifying religion by saying its only bad when “conservative”. I think conservative values have a lot to offer humanity, but in today’s political world religion has taken over the conservative movement and it gets a bad name.
Good conservative values would promote civil rights, abortion rights and a government that stays out of our private lives.
I really fear that religion has ruined conservativism…and please don’t accuse me of supporting the Bush administration….the least conservative administration we have had with its socialistic big brother attitude, take over of private equity markets, torture and the allowing of religion to control everything.
We need to be very clear in our fight against religion…not muddy the waters with conservative or liberal. ALL religion is bad…you simply can’t say it is certain religions acting wrongly in the name of God..there is no god, so you can’t act wrongly, its all the same: mind control for the simple masses.
We have to promote education, reject religion and its evil influences in its entirety, or we will continue to see one group or another oppressed because without the fear they instill in people, there is no need to tithe.
So reject religion, don’t live in fear of the “afterlife” (there isn’t one) and you will see the reasons for hating groups of people and in fact the teaching of those reasons dissapear.