The “liberal” leadership is becoming more bold in their attack on our freedoms. Is it because their decades of carefully calculated, progressive indoctrination of people has finally succeeded to the point where they no longer need to be sneaky about it? Have large enough portions of our society become so thoroughly bamboozled that the anti-choice leadership can now come out of the closet in safety, the success of their agenda secured? That would appear to be so in California. However, we still have a chance of sanity and freedom in Montana. At least for now.

      8/19/08 the Daily Interlake printed an associated press article stating, “California’s highest court on Monday barred doctors from invoking their religious beliefs as a reason to deny treatment to gays and lesbians, ruling that state law prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination extends to the medical profession. Justice Joyce Kennard wrote that two Christian fertility doctors who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian have neither a free speech right nor a religious exemption from the state’s law.”

      Several articles in the 4/08 Daily Interlake chronicled the persecution of Montana pharmacists refusing to dispense contraceptives because of their religious beliefs. One article printed 4/13 was written by a nurse who believes it “unethical” to refuse “to sell birth control to women with legitimate prescriptions and that his license should be revoked unless he resumes selling birth control…Do Montanan’s really believe the world would be better off it women did not have access to birth control?...The vast majority of Americans advocate reproductive decisions remain at the individual level rather than the government.” Note the use of emotion in her language, invoking our common belief in self-determination and individual rights. Planned Parenthood of Montana was right in the thick of it, urging the pharmacy board to rule against the pharmacists. So far, the Montana Board of Pharmacy didn’t fall for it. Their spokesperson stated in an AP article 4/24/08 that currently Montana “has no rule or statute that requires pharmacies to stock every drug on the market, and we decided to leave it at that…I think we should wait and see what happens in the Legislature.” “Jeff Laszloffy, president and CEO of the Montana Family Foundation said he was glad the board decided not to usurp the authority of the legislature… Planned Parenthood is famous for saying that government should never be allowed to come between a woman and her physician, yet they’re asking you to do something even more egregious, he said. They’re asking you to place government squarely between a pharmacist and God.”

      My point is not about contraceptives or homosexuality. The examples given reveal blatant disregard of First Amendment rights protecting religion. The legal battles are not for patient rights but against the rights of the religious. It needs to be emphasized that one of the California doctors referred the lesbian “to another fertility specialist without moral objections” and the patient “has since given birth to three children.” Note that the patients wanting birth control pills can get them from other pharmacies without moral objections to contraception, or get them from Planned Parenthood itself. The banner of patient rights is an emotional smokescreen.

      There are many clear-thinking individuals left in this nation that have long-recognized the “liberal” leadership’s agenda of oppression. Hopefully, the progressive boldness of anti-choice expression by this leadership will make clear their true agenda to those of their followers who are well-intentioned and have a decent sense of right, wrong, and fairness. I pray this happens before it’s too late.

Annie Bukacek MD