Virginia Pharmacist Acts On Faith, Is Bad At Job

Here's another one.

A Virginia Pharmacy, Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy, has announced that it will not sell contraceptives of any kind, even if someone comes in with a prescription, due to the belief that they go against the teachings of the church. That includes condoms, as well as morning-after pills and birth control pills.

I could cite all sorts of statistics that show that anywhere contraceptives are not made available, teen pregnancies increase, or that teens in places where abstinence-only is the sole form of birth control taught in schools are just as likely, if not more likely to have sex before marriage as teens in places where condoms and other contraceptives are made available, and are dramatically less likely to use any form of protection when they do. I could talk all day about how separation of church and state is the foundation of our country, and any time that someone imposes their religious beliefs upon the life and liberty of other people, it results in a bad situation for everyone involved. I could marvel in slack-jawed wonder at the fact that in this time of war, economic disaster, and general uneasiness and unrest in this nation there is a Bishop, Bishop Paul S. Loverde, who thinks the best use of his time and influence is going around blessing pharmacies for not selling contraceptives. But I won't.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the one thing that stands out to me about this story. Isn't Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy manager Robert Semler just astoundingly bad at his job? I mean, can you believe just how wholly awful he is at performing his chosen occupation? Wow! It's really something!

I guess I always just thought that if you have a job that encompasses a series of tasks, and you one day decide that you're not going to do some of those tasks anymore, you got fired. It doesn't matter if your decision is based on faith or not. And let's not pretend that we're talking about just any faith, here. This is the Catholic Church. If Robert Semler said he wasn't going to sell contraceptives because his deity, the allmighty trout Finface, said that birth control gives power to the evil Salmon King, we'd call him crazy and take away his license. There is freedom of religion in this country, but only if you pick the right religion. But I'm getting away from my point. What I'm saying is, if you're a dentist, and your job is to clean teeth, and you one day announce that you will no longer be cleaning molars, you're probably going to have to find a new line of work.

Okay, granted, if you walk into a place called Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy, you might expect to see a few Jesus references hanging around. Maybe your pharmacist has a crucifix around his neck. Maybe there's a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall. Whatever. That's fine. I live in Brooklyn. When I go down to my local pharmacy, everyone behind the counter has a Star of David around their neck. I don't mind, because it has absolutely no effect on my transactions there. But if I went in and they suddenly told me that I couldn't buy a bottle of Advil unless I said the Sh'ma five times, I'd probably take my business elsewhere. And doubly so if it wasn't Advil I was after, but a prescription medication.

When a doctor gives you a prescription, you take it to the pharmacy and expect that the pharmacist will use his crazy powers to read your doctor's handwriting and correctly interpret the proper medication. You further expect that the pharmacist will then give you the proper amount of the proper medication. That is the pharmacist's job. It is not to decide whether or not the doctor was correct in prescribing this medication, or whether you really have a condition that could be affected by this medication. It is certainly not to decide whether the doctor was morally correct to prescribe this medication, or whether you are morally sound to ask for it. That is not the pharmacist's job. Read slip, put pills in bottle. That is the pharmacist's job.

I apologize to any pharmacists out there if it seems like I'm oversimplifying your occupation. I realize there's more to it than that, but we're talking about the very basics here, because that's where Richard Semler really screwed the pooch, presumably without using any form of protection.

"I am grateful to be able to practice," Semler said, "where my conscience will never be violated and my faith does not have to be checked at the door each morning."

You know what? If the basic performance of your duties violates your conscience and forces you to abandon your faith, maybe you should look into another line of work. I'm not saying you have to join the clergy, although that is certainly an option. But if you are truly and deeply offended by people using birth control, maybe running a pharmacy, which is a place where people go to obtain birth control, is not right for you. You could run a stationary store. Nobody walks into a stationary store expecting to buy Trojans. Or maybe you could become a florist. No morning-after pills there.

The point is, if you have a strong moral objection to something, that's your personal issue. I reserve the right to disagree with your opinion, and I freely grant you the right to disagree with mine. But when you then put yourself in a position in society where your opinion adversely affects the freedoms and rights of other people, you're just being an asshole. I don't like guns. I don't think people should have them. It would, therefore, be pretty irresponsible of me to open a gun shop, since I would be forced into a position of either swallowing my strong personal viewpoint on a daily basis or failing to provide the basic service that my business claims to provide. Opening and maintaining a gun shop would be a pretty dickish move on my part. There is no way that I could do it without making somebody unhappy, either myself or my would-be customers. If your business venture is 100% guaranteed to make somebody unhappy, you should probably reconsider going ahead with it. That's just math. And then I would have to take into account the fact that people who really want guns are going to do whatever they have to do in order to get guns. If I won't sell them to them, they will go to my competitor. If there is no competitor within a convenient distance, they will turn to illegal means. Am I directly responsible, then, for promoting the illegal sale and acquisition of firearms? No, not directly. But I probably still could have done something about it, like, say, sold my gun shop to someone who doesn't have such a strong objection to people having guns.

So, Robert Semler, and the other pharmacists out there who have chosen not to sell contraceptives based on faith, I want you to think long and hard about what you're doing with your life. People who don't have access to contraceptives have sex anyway, and as a result they spread disease and they get pregnant before they are ready, willing, or capable to raise a child. People who don't have easy access to contraceptives but really, really want them will go elsewhere to get them. That means more time spent traveling, which is a drain on budgets and a detriment to the environment. And if more pharmacies follow your example, and contraceptives - which, I will remind you, are entirely legal in this country - become too difficult to obtain, people who really want them will find other, potentially unsafe ways to obtain them. Think also about the fact that your primary job is to fill prescriptions. If you refuse to do that, you are bad at your job. I just don't think there's any other way to say it.