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AntiTheist
Guest
Out of curiosity, how many gay people do you personally know?
Judge rules Christians have NO special rights as he throws out case of sex therapist who refused to work with gay couples
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HeWillProvide
Guest
What’s the big deal to the judge and the homosexual couple?
Looking for a doctor is like shopping - you find what’s right for you.
Doctors should be able to prescribe and heal however they want.
If you don’t like how they do it, go somewhere else.
Kind of like restaurants have the sign “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
So should all businesses. Go elsewhere if you don’t like the business/doctor. It’s not like he’s the only one in town.
Looking for a doctor is like shopping - you find what’s right for you.
Doctors should be able to prescribe and heal however they want.
If you don’t like how they do it, go somewhere else.
Kind of like restaurants have the sign “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
So should all businesses. Go elsewhere if you don’t like the business/doctor. It’s not like he’s the only one in town.
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Supercatholic
Guest
It doesn’t matter if I know one or one billion. I can see by your selection of religion:none, the only moral and ethics you have is that of your own limitations, and since you posed this question in the first place I must have really gotten under your skin. GOOD! Let me guess, some of your best friends are gay, right? Just like it was popular in the 1970s to say “Some of my best friends are black” even though most white people didn’t personally know any black people back then. DON’T WORDSMITH ME, YOU’LL LOSE EVERY TIME!
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Jermosh
Guest
Please do not forget that the employer has rights as well. Although your term of anything is quite scary really.
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sedonaman
Guest
Re: “There should really just be a clear contract between the employer and employee to begin with.”
This is an interesting point. Did the employee’s job description include treating gay clients?
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sedonaman
Guest
You mean they don’t ? I don’t remember where you live, but in the U.S. if a minority [religion, race, etc.] member gets offended, their feelings trump whatever rights the majority has. Period.
It is not necessary for it to become dominant. I understand that the Amish do not have to pay Social Security taxes and will be exempt from the new health care law.
Imagine this: Minority religions become dominant through legal maneuvering and create their own set of exclusive legal protections. These religions say its members can persecute the majority through malicious litigation. Should they have the right to persecute through malicious litigation?
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TMC
Guest
I see post #40. My point is that is the way it works in the US, with very few exceptions. Is that not how it works in the UK (where the case was)? There have been some cases here of pharmicists being fired for not prescribing certain things, convenience store employees for not selling certain things, etc. The answer is generally that you shouldn’t take a job if you find some aspect of the job morally objectionable. Is that not happened in this case?
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TMC
Guest
I don’t know that the Church ever taught that Catholics should be given more rights than others. If it did, I think you have to go back a lot farther than the '60s to find it. At least we can agree that the Church does not teach this now, and hasn’t for some time.
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sedonaman
Guest
Does this include Muslim taxi drivers who refuse to carry non-Muslims with alcohol and/or with seeing-eye dogs? How about Muslim grocery clerks who refuse to handle pork?
We have laws that are supposed to be administered equally, but in practice, the politically favored religions, races, etc. [generally, “The Other”] are granted exemptions [or their transgressions ignored altogether] while the majority [read: white Christian male] are singled out for the most egregious treatment for the most innocuous “transgressions” * I suspect a significant degree of this attitude is at work here.
The fact is the modern liberal/Leftist creed measures a person’s morality not by his actions but by his support for the “correct” political causes and the inverse of his perceived degree of power. Therefore, the Muslims in the above situations, for example, are indulged almost to the point of sexual orgasm by the Left, while the counselor is mercilessly pilloried. [There might also be some sexual gratification by the Left in the latter case.]*
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NoMoreGames
Guest
I’m kind on confused. What special rights do American Hindus and American atheists have that American Christians don’t?
Just because it’s happening doesn’t mean it’s right.
No. No citizen should have special rights. I’ve said that before. I don’t get what you were trying to say with this. I agreed that the therapist should not be able to be brought to court for his actions.
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TMC
Guest
I would say that it does. The law in this country may differ. The law does not allow providers of public accomodations to discriminate on the basis of certain characteristics. I don’t know if that would apply to rejecting people carrying alcohol or not. I am not sure what your point is re: the Grocer. Why would a grocer stock something he is morally opposed to selling? If you are talking about an employee - than he may be able to seek a reasonable accomodation under the law or he may not, depending on the circumstances. But my basic point is that if you take a job that requires you to do something against your morals - get another job. There is no “right” to make your employer hire you to do a job that you refuse to do.
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thegreypiper
Guest
Pfft. I bet if it was a headknocker facing Mecca the courts would have stumbling and slobbering all over themselves about respecting the diversity of that opinion.
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Santi2
Guest
There was a contract of employment which imposed an obligation on the employee to comply with the ethics and equal opportunity policies of the employer. The employee in this case was also trained by the employer as a sex therapist and knew that it was likely that he would advise same sex couples. So, by legal technicality, the employee breached his contractual obligation where there was non-compliance to policies.
Re: “There should really just be a clear contract between the employer and employee to begin with.”
This is an interesting point. Did the employee’s job description include treating gay clients?
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WatchingMedia
Guest
Conscience clauses permit those with legitimate religious or moral convictions to be able to refrain from having to participate in a particular action. (Example to refrain from: abortion; Catholic adoption agencies from providing babies to homosexual couples; etc.)
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sedonaman
Guest
The right not to be offended. *
It’s right when the law says it is.
You are saying that no citizen should have special rights, and I agree, but I’m saying that some do [as in, “All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others.”]. As I stated before, the right to conscience is not limited to Christians. For example, back before the draft protest times of the Vietnam War, conscientious objection status was limited to members of certain religions, but the courts declared that anyone could object based on his conscience, even atheists, and rightfully so.*
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sedonaman
Guest
I’m not sure this is a reasonable expectation. Has anyone produced here his training plan and a job description of his duties?
I suppose next the law is going to require treatment of kleptomaniacs to be the facilitation of their kleptomania; after all, we can’t discriminate against others based on anything, white Christian males excepted, of course.
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sedonaman
Guest
There was a lawsuit in the U.S. that claimed the Boy Scouts was “a public accommodation.”
I was referring to an employee. As a former supervisor, I disagree with this last statement: there are racial/ethnic quotas [again, white Christian men excepted] that the government requires you to meet. I know because I had to meet them.
Take a look at the graphs at the bottom of this article uiowa.edu/~030116/116/articles/bronner2.htm and tell me if you see anything wrong with them.
Examples abound, but space is limited, so let me take one example. The Mohammed cartoons were “an offense against Muslim sensibilities”, but the “Dung Madonna” was an “exercise in free speech”, and you “don’t see it”?
Does error have rights? The modern liberal regime bans the merest breath of the Christian religion in public schools, while subsidizing student clubs devoted to witchcraft. The Leftstream media routinely attack the “oppressive” and “racist” police, while ignoring the criminality of the criminals whom the police are “oppressing”. These inversions of decency and sanity are not the work of anarchists. They are the logical consequences of the central credo of modern Liberalism: that all intolerance and discrimination must be eliminated. In a society dedicated to that proposition, the good itself must ultimately be seen as evil, because the good discriminates against evil, while evil must be blessed with victim status, because it is excluded by the good.
A literary device used for emphasis.
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Santi2
Guest
In this particular case, the equal opportunity policy is silent on a conscience clause in terms of the employee’s duties and responsibilities towards an “outcome” i.e. provision of service. The employer has an obligation by law to provide a service which complies with legislation on equal opportunity. While all employers have internal equal opportunity policies here as dictated by law, it is only specific to recruitment and interpersonal relationships within organisations. Any consideration of each employee’s religious convictions would be at the discretion of the employer as a matter of good management or practice, which in this case, the employer runs foul of “good management or practice” because it could have easily assigned another counsellor. This case is an employer-employee matter and was not a legal action by the gay couple.
As to Catholic adoption agencies providing babies to homosexual couples. The courts recently recognised an opt out for Catholic agencies which provides relief where there is a conflict to Catholic teachings and compliance with legislation on equal opportunity in respect of services.
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