If hospital employees refuse treatment to queers (or just curse them), the Montana House says, "Okie Dokie, buddy!"

 

The new Hypocrite's Oath for practicing medicine in Montana has moved one step closer to being the law of the State.

From LGBTQ Nation (citing the Montana Free Press):

Montana’s Republican-led state House has approved a so-called “medical conscience bill” that would allow medical providers to refuse services based on “ethical, moral, or religious beliefs or principles,” even in emergencies. The bill now requires a third House vote before proceeding to the state’s Republican-led Senate.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Amy Regier (R), has specifically said she authored it to allow medical professionals to refuse abortions, medical marijuana, physician-assisted euthanasia, and gender-affirming care for transgender people, all things that Regier called “lifestyle and elective procedures" ...

Regier promises that her bill, known as H.B. 303: Implement Medical Ethics and Diversity Act, would only apply to “narrow circumstances” and wouldn’t lead to large-scale discrimination against LGBTQ+ patients.

However, the bill’s text says that it would allow basically any individual involved in healthcare to refuse services. These individuals include any healthcare employees, doctors, nurses, aides, pharmacy workers, medical and mental health school members, lab techs, board members, insurers, other payers, “or any other person who facilitates or participates in a healthcare service.”

In short, this means that anyone involved in the chain of care could refuse to provide services for anyone or anything they object to. This means that any marginalized person will have to worry that any part of their care could be interrupted at any point by anybody, based on an undefined notion of “conscious.”

The bill says that objecting individuals cannot be disciplined for “engaging in speech or expressive activity protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” unless a health department or board proves “beyond a reasonable doubt that the medical practitioner’s speech was the direct cause of physical harm to a person.”

Put another way, any medical-related worker could possibly express discriminated viewpoints to patients, and the groups that work with those workers couldn’t reprimand them for it without undergoing a long and arduous process.

I am tempted to focus here on the ability to refuse treatment as the most important part of this legislation. After all, if I work in the hospital pharmacy and conscientiously believe that certain types of people should have suffering inflicted upon them to warn them of God's impending damnation of their souls, I would have the right to refuse to fill a prescription for their pain medications. If I am a devout Catholic surgeon who believes that all forms of birth control are morally wrong, I can work in a public hospital and refuse to do vasectomies or tubal ligations because, you know, sterilization is wrong and my Hypocrite's Oath permits me to deny care.

But I don't honestly think that's the worst part of this legislation. 

The "Show Me" state contemplates a "Don't Say Gay" rule stricter than Florida's

Lawmakers in Missouri are preparing to debate a proposed "Don't Say Gay" law that even its sponsor admits could make a teacher mentioning in a 12th grade class that she has a wife or he has a husband guilty of a felony.

From The Kansas City Star:

Missouri lawmakers are weighing a bill that would ban teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation at any grade level, no matter the class subject. 

The bill is set to be heard Tuesday morning by the Missouri Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee. It would limit any public or charter school staff member from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation unless they are a mental health care provider and have permission from a parent. 

Duval County Florida has banned the biographies of Rosa Parks, Hank Aaron, Malala, Hiawatha, Jackie Robinson, and Sonia Sotomayor

 

... among 175 others.

The mind reels at the sheer audacity of declaring the story of Rosa Parks to be "racially divisive."

The mind melts at the idea that the biography of a sitting Supreme Court Justice is removed from the shelves.

The heart breaks to find out that we have returned to a time when Jackie Robinson is again controversial.

The rest of the list is equally bizarre, including ...

Christopher Rufo and the very bad, race-hustling Tweet ...

 OR: How Christopher Rufo aspires to be the Tucker Carlson of higher education ...

I hate to link to it, but you really need to be able to see it: 

The debate between "Lincoln freeing the slaves" and "the slaves freeing themselves" has existed for a long time in the community of Civil War historians.

It not only pre-exists the development of Critical Race Theory, it pre-exists the entire life of the race-hustling Rufo.

The emphasis on the idea that Blacks were passive recipients of the white grace of emancipation delivered by President Abraham Lincoln is one of the prime mantras of the avowedly racist writings of the highly influential "Dunning School" of Civil War and Reconstruction history at Columbia University that dominated US textbooks from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Here's an example of the kind of writing that the Dunning School offered, from William E. Woodward's Meet General Grant (1928):

"The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world that ever became free without any effort of their own. ... They had not started the war nor ended it, [but] twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres and a mule.”

This kind of racist, anti-historical crap (to which both Mssrs. Rufo and Carlson appear to subscribe) was most ably answered by W. E. B. Dubois in the closing pages of Black Reconstruction in 1935:

Tools you can use: Quotes to prove that the framers did no advocate for a religious republic

Given the continuing spate of "religious liberty" laws that we should really begin calling "religious privilege" laws it is important to debunk the right-wing fiction that the Founders and Framers all intended religion to have a favored place in the United States, and believed strongly that there was no "republican virtue" without Christianity.

This idea is being perpetrated locally by the so-called "First State Institute on the Constitution" -- a favorite of the DE GOP -- which charges students $50 a shot to be indoctrinated with the views of Christian extremist Michael Peroutka, among whose favorite quotes (while running for MD Attorney General) is

“Two standards ... determine whether something is lawful, [first] is whether or not it meets the constitutional limitations of government and [second] is whether it is harmonious with God’s law.” 

But what DID the Framers and Founders actually say about Christianity and the State?

NOT what you've been told by conservatives or the current Supreme Court ...

Shine a light in dark places: NCC DE Moms for Liberty -- crusaders or useful tools??

 

This is what the national Moms for Liberty organization says on its "Who We Are" page:

This is what they don't tell you:

THIS is one of the most dangerous websites in America

You probably don't WANT to visit RatedBooks.org, which is an unspoken product of the whacko Moms for Liberty, but maybe this quote will convince you that you need to do so:

"Unlike books' much younger cousins in the media family - movies, television programs, music, and video games - books remain unrated."

This is the website that tells you that the following authors are purveyors of "pornography" and their works should be restricted in K-12 education:

Margaret Atwood

Judy Blume

Robert Heinlein

Bernard Malamud

Toni Morrison

Jodi Picoult

Philip Roth

Kurt Vonnegut

Richard Wright

... and many more ...

This is also the website that is helping to coordinate organizations across America to have these books removed from library shelves or placed in restricted sections ... and not just in school libraries ...

There are more sites than this which are doing the same, but you have to start somewhere.

This is a nationwide attempt to eliminate not just LGBTQIA+ voices, not just Black voices, to the marginalize and shame some of America's most beloved and important writers ... as PORNOGRAPHERS.

You need to pay VERY CLOSE ATTENTION to this page and its fellow travelers, because they are intent upon dulling the minds of your children.