The messed-up case for religious discrimination

Last week, we lost a member of the family. The details, being both private and not particularly germane to the argument, I will spare you. But suffice to say that this person has been in a long slow decline for more than a few years and had signed a DNR order. During his last days, he improbably contracted H1N1, and then even more improbably recovered from it, but as a result had to spend time in isolation–which was incredibly traumatic–but for more than the obvious reason of spending what could be your last few days on earth utterly alone.

Because you see, he wasn’t utterly alone. He was paid a visit. Not by a doctor or a nurse or other trained medical professional, not by a family member in a contamination suit, but by a woman who worked in the hospital’s billing department. During the course of processing his records, she saw that he had a DNR flag on his profile. So she looked up what room he was in and went to talk to him. Using her administrative bona fides, she let herself into his room <em>in isolation</em> and proceeded to preach God’s love to him, and urge him to take off the purple bracelet and embrace life and rescind the DNR order. Ambushed, unable to leave or even really move, experiencing difficulties in speaking, and listening to someone he didn’t even know or who didn’t know him or the suffering he was enduring tell him that it was God’s plan that he should suffer <em>more</em> and prolong his suffering as long as medically possible was, as you could imagine, more than a little upsetting.

I’m sure most of you, upon reading this, would respond with a decidedly litigious salt-the-earth response. And believe me, I can think of few people more intimidating and rejecting of this sort of crap than this family member’s immediate next of kin. However, when faced with the choice of spending her loved one’s final days at his side, or off at an attorney’s office seeking redress from a faceless medical institution, it’s understandable that she chose the former path. With the little free time she had available, she was able to get the hospital to put an official note of complaint in her personnel file, and get her to solemnly pinky-swear that she wouldn’t go traipsing off to patient’s rooms to harass them any more. She then went back to trying to comfort her dying partner.

Considering the tenor of religious evangelical in the community that this took place in, we are not only <em>not</em> surprised that this was allowed to happen, but we have zero expectation that this woman will not turn around and do the same thing again. While your mainstream Christians (and that includes many of the Catholic denomination as well) would be appalled at this sort of behavior, the evangelical far-right fundamentalists revel in it… not only the invasion of privacy and traumatising of a dying man, but the risk to their own livelihood. Firm believers in the passage of the Bible that says that those who do God’s works will be hated by the world and will be persecuted for being good; they actively seek out opportunities to put this to the test. For what better persecution to bring back to your church for bragging rights than losing your job trying to convince someone to do the will of God? Think of the religious discrimination you could bring against your employer when they fire you because you behaved in an unethical and unprofessional manner. The payday for that clear-cut case of employers hating God could fill your church’s coffers, <em>and</em> allow you to live comfortably for quite some time as you pursue your pharmacist’s degree so that you can move on to denying women their birth control (for God!).

Our personal story sounds uncomfortably like the recent story of Abby Johnson’s ‘change of heart’ from a Director of a local Planned Parenthood to an anti-choice activist smuggling confidential patient records out of the office to give to her fellow Christian warriors. They’re basically one in the same: In both cases a christianist extremist used access to private medical records afforded to them by their job to engage in gross violations of an individual’s privacy. It’s kissing cousin to all of those cases where an evangelical christianist became a pharmacist specifically to deny birth control and AIDS medications to sinners. This isn’t a few random assholes: They are being actively encouraged by their pastors to do this for the sake of Jesus. And it keeps happening.

There are plenty of jobs that these people can fill without a lot of training. They can become billing/administrative agents at hospitals, they can apply for survey jobs where they may be able to use the questionnaire’s contents as a starting point to evangelize. They may go in for training to become pharmacists or medical assistants. In every case their job would give them access to people and/or to the private medical information of individuals who have a right not to be assaulted.

We tend to think of discrimination as something passive, but it’s not always the case. If a restaurant refused to hire an African-American waiter because "the customers wanted a white waitstaff," we would be completely abhorrent to that obvious form of racial discrimination. But if the waiter happens to be a balls-to-the-wall vegan, and will make disapproving comments every time a patron orders the boef bourgingnon, that’s a different kettle of fish (to mix a metaphor). It would be religious discrimination to say, for example, that your restaurant won’t hire any Jews, or that any Muslim needing a prayer break would be fired. And if the restaurant only served shellfish and pork, I could see the case being made that maybe someone who keeps strict kosher should find work elsewhere. But here’s the thing: you don’t see a lot of those cases. You don’t see cases over and over again of devout Muslims declaring that they’re being discriminated against because of their religion because they didn’t get that job at the bar at Hooters. Hasidic Jews aren’t banging down the doors of Porky Joe’s BBQ for employment. You don’t see a lot of cases where Christian Scientist doctors bring suit against their hospital because they should be allowed to pray over their patients instead of actually treating them. What we see over and over again (at least in the States) are fundamentalist evangelical Christians deliberately taking jobs that will allow them to "start shit" knowing full well that they plan to act in an unethical and unprofessional manner, and hiding behind "religious persecution" when the get called on it. It’s definitely not all Christians — in fact, these actions can be applied to a particular minority that are usually localized to specific congregations.

The problem with handling this in a policy way is that it doesn’t prevent or take back what happened in that hospital room. If you hire someone who is obviously more interested in bringing back her own little persecution story to her church group than she is in taking home a paycheck, you won’t deter anything by having a "policy" that says that any unprofessional or unethical conduct in a patient area is cause for immediate dismissal. It doesn’t change the fact that the evangelical christianist is deliberately going to trigger or flaunt that policy. And their freedom of religion, and freedom to practice their religion, <strong>stops <em>WELL</em> short</strong> of being able to assault other people, even "just the one time." And you have a choice: if you knowingly hire someone who comes from a predatory church, you are directly placing your customers/patients/patrons in the position of prey. Or you can choose to pre-emptively protect the privacy and well-being of your patients/customers.

So there, I’ve said it. I’m 100% in favor of people declining jobs to people based on the particular church they attend. If you belong to a congregation where your pastor is actively encouraging you to seek employment for the express purpose of being able to assault other people, then I see zero constitutional reason why your right of "religious expression" supersedes the rights of your potential victims to remain unmolested.