Lame Duck President Bush Pushes Right Wing Christian Agenda

President Bush is pushing a last minute rule change that would allow doctors, nurses, pharmacists and health care workers to refuse treating rape victims, lesbian, gay and trans-people because of religious objections.

Protests Over a Rule to Protect Health Providers
By ROBERT PEAR
NY Times
Published: November 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job discrimination laws.

The proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

It would also prevent hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices and drugstores from requiring employees with religious or moral objections to “assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity” financed by the Department of Health and Human Services.
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The proposal is supported by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Health Association, which represents Catholic hospitals.

Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, said that in recent years, “we have seen a variety of efforts to force Catholic and other health care providers to perform or refer for abortions and sterilizations.”
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In a letter commenting on the proposed rule, Mr. Ishimaru and Ms. Griffin, from the employment commission, said that 40 years of court decisions had carefully balanced “employees’ rights to religious freedom and employers’ business needs.”

The proposed rule, they said, “would throw this entire body of law into question.”
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As an example of the policies to which they object, Bush administration officials cited a Connecticut law that generally requires hospitals to provide rape victims with timely access to and information about emergency contraception.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut, a Republican, said the state law represented “an earnest compromise” between the rights of rape victims and the interests of health care practitioners who had moral or religious scruples against emergency contraception.

The state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said the proposed regulation “would blow apart solutions and compromises that have been reached by people of good will in Connecticut and elsewhere.”

This brings Bush’s administration to a new height of bigotry and persecution .