Having Actually MET Life...

Memo to "Pharmacists For Life": YOU ARE DUMB.

Reason Why Atheists Are Better Than Fundamentalists, #97 of 4,800 (collect them all!): Atheists happily work in our nation's bookstores, freely and happily dispensing Bibles, Korans, Chicken Soup For The Christian Soul, and Left Behind books, despite our profound belief that these books are full of shit and will destroy the nascent, child-like intellect residing in the skull. We keep our yaps shut, and perform the job we were hired for, taking your money and handing you the items you ask for without comment or hindrance.

Pity the same can't be said for fundamentalist pharmacist assholes, who have made headlines repeatedly over the past few years for refusing to dispense birth control pills, emergency contraception doses, and RU-486 because these pills conflict morally with both their deeply held religious beliefs and their inexplicable ignorance of science.

I mean, the RU-486 thing is just the run of the mill embryo fetishism that drives the modern pro-life movement. At least RU-486 does the thing that the people opposing it dislike. It's still dumb, but it's a familiar kind of dumb. Some people believe that an embryo is the single most important thing in the entire universe, and others of us believe that abortion should be legal through roughly the 90th trimester. But if you take a job as a pharmacist, you know going in you're going to be dispensing pills you wouldn't take yourself. That's part of the job description. If your beliefs don't allow you to do that, then you should be selling teddy bears holding crosses to Jesus-freaks at the strip-mall "inspirational store", not next door at Walgreens adding "the peril of your immortal soul" to the list of potential side-effects.

Gone are the days when pharmacists were practically small-town doctors in their own right. The days of the knowledgeable old man who'd wink at you slyly as you fearfully asked him for your first box of rubbers are long gone, and thank fuck for that. These days, to be a "pharmacists", you need to know three things - how to tell the difference between Cialis and Viagra; how to count to 50, and how to use the electronic time-card system at the Target that pays you seven bucks an hour to do things one and two. Just because you're behind a glass wall doesn't give you the right to pass judgment, and just because you wear a lab coat, that doesn't make you a fucking scientist.

Which explains the assault on emergency contraception and birth-control pills. In the latest instance, of which there have been many, a pharmacist in New Hampshire refused to issue emergency contraception to someone with a valid prescription because of his psychotic pro-life views. In addition, he refused to refer her to another pharmacy that -could- fill the prescription. Since the moron in question, Todd Sklencar, is hiding out and refusing to talk to people, we'll have to rely on the testimony of his victim, who was unable to fill the prescription within the 72 hours required for emergency contraception to be effective. Yes, it's ACTUAL QUOTING A QUOTE TIME!

"He said something like, 'I believe this will end the fertilization of the egg and this conception was your choice,'"

- Laconia resident Suzanne Richards.

Of course it will end the fertilization of the egg. It's CONTRACEPTION, you-maple syrup-snorting, backwoods fuck! This goes way beyond blastula-worship. Now the pro-lifers are calling the LACK OF FERTILIZATION the ending of a life. "Sorry, lady, the spoims gotta do what the spoims gotta do, and I'm morally obligated to do everything in my power to force you to have a baby."

Pharmacist organizations do have "conscience clauses" supporting this kind of rampant bullshit, but at least that same code of conduct requires any busybodies in their profession to help the patient fill the prescription somewhere else. That, of course, is completely unreasonable and "stupid", according to the president of Pharmacists for Life International, Karen Brauer, who really, really shouldn't be bandying about words like "stupid" after saying things like:

"If we're not going to kill a human being, we're not going to help the customer go do it somewhere else."

For the last time, a bunch of sperm that may or may not be viable heading toward an egg that may or may not be THERE is NOT a human life. I don't care if you believe that it is, you do not get to put yourself in a position of power and ruin other people's lives just because you're INSANE. I may believe, in my heart of hearts, that dog shit tastes like sweet, sweet candy, but if I ran down the street shoving dog shit into people's mouths, I'd be sent somewhere quiet and alone for a very long time indeed. Yet "pharmacists for life" somehow get a pass from society.

Tolerating the crazy people does not mean we should let them set policy.

Catholics

Memo to the Catholic Church: YOU ARE DUMB.

The Catholics are getting uppity again. I don't know what it is. Maybe John Paul's gotten his 90th wind. Maybe he just feels like he has to keep his pope hand strong. Or maybe, since it's been six months or so since any priests have gotten caught having sex with children, covering up having sex with children, or paying large sums of money for having sex with children, they think they get to throw some moral weight around again.

And when Catholics need to throw their moral weight around, but don't have the time to write an entire catechism, they turn to their favorite afterschool snack, the withholding of which is, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, a weapon of great power. I can think of dozens of places even rural Catholics could get saltines and cheap wine if they wanted to. It all gets transubstantiated in the end, anyway.

So, in their ceaseless effort to crush science, progress, and the pursuit of any knowledge not contained in their 2,000-year-old moral primer slash list of begattings, the Catholics have been seriously discussing telling politicians that support legal abortion or gay marriage that no, they cannot have their cracker, and no, they cannot have their wine, and no, you cannot pretend to eat Jesus because we're right and you're wrong. Nyah nyah.

And that's... problematic, but, you know, these politicians are out in public, with public views, and if they want to let their church influence them, we can all see that, and we can decide at voting time if we want the Pope's hand up the ass of our elected official or not.

But now, one Colorado diocese has decided that anybody who VOTES for a pro-choice candidate shouldn't get their cracker and Jesus juice either. Which should be very interesting in a country with a supposedly secret ballot. In all the coverage of this, nobody has bothered to ask how they're supposed to know who gets the cracker and who gets the shaft. Seems to me they're basically exchanging giving Communion to a whole bunch of unavowed pro-choice advocates for giving Communion to a giant pile of stinking filthy liars. But that's just me.

You may be saying to yourself... "Colorado? Vanguard of religious extremism? But aren't those lovely, mannered South Park boys from there?" Yes. Colorado is not traditionally the first state that comes to mind when you think of rampant religious extremism. But to help you with the cognitive dissonance, I've prepared a visual aid to show you where Colorado stands amidst the various idiocies of the U.S.:

As you can see, Colorado is a virtual epicenter of moronitude. You've got the crazy Mormons to the west, the entire Midwest to the northeast, Jim Inhofe just over the border in Oklahoma, and do I even need to mention Texas? No mitigating influences to the north or south, so you can see where poor Colorado, adrift in a sea of national idiocy, may find itself turning to rabid Catholocism in a kind of Lord of the Flies moment.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not giving specific descriptions of the dumbness inherent in certain coastal areas does not mean the Tan Lands are magical enclaves where reason and intelligence thrive They are just not relevant to the current discussion. They'll get theirs in due course.

Still, the great things about Catholics is that, being students of the Bible, they don't have a problem with blatant self-contradiction, as Colorado bishop Michael Sheridan so aptly demonstrates in his directive. What starts with "A" and ends with "E" and makes the crowds all scream with glee? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"As in the matter of abortion, any Catholic politician who would promote so-called same-sex marriage and any Catholic who would vote for that political candidate place themselves outside the full communion of the church and may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled by the Sacrament of Penance... the church never directs citizens to vote for any specific candidate." 

Which is technically true. Using your supposed spiritual authority to intimidate and threaten people into not voting for unnamed people who just happen to have been in the news a lot lately for being Catholic and liberal is not the same as coming out and saying "JOHN KERRY IS THE ANTICHRIST!". However, in the great Venn diagram of life, those two sets are enclosed by a much larger superset, the superset we like to call DUMB.