On Religion, Morality and Professionalism

In my travels across the web yesterday, I found the following article that raised my ire. It took me a while to figure out exactly why this particular pharamacist's tale annoyed me so much. There's the obvious tirade about imposing one's moral values on another person, but somehow that just didn't quite capture the essence of it.

Then I thought back to another article I had read on the weekend that just made me plain furious - and I'm not normally an angry person. Michael Coren is far from my favourite columnist, but I will read him on occasion because he has made points that have been thought provoking.

Both of these two articles are fundamentally about the crossroads between religious freedoms, freedom of expression and individual rights. In both articles, the core subject is basically one where religious freedoms are used to justify marginalizing someone else. Whether it is a gay or transgender person in the workplace being marginalized because of their sexual orientation, or it is because someone - for whatever reason - had unprotected sex and realized they had made a serious mistake.

At first, my reaction to both stories was righteous indignation towards the Pharmacist and Mr. Coren - essentially, 'How dare you impose your personal morality upon others?'. Digging around in the attic of my mind, I find a few interesting tidbits.

First, both the Pharmacist and Mr. Coren make a key fundamental error in arriving at their conclusions. Rather than drawing their boundaries at the points of actual discussion, they instead project beyond the boundaries and begin to incorporate assumptions both about motives and desires that are not relevant.

In the case of the Pharmacist, it is not his job to make a moral judgement about dispensing a medication. A doctor has presumably already made that analysis as part of the decision making process. Does this mean that suddenly a patient with a prescription has to pass a second hurdle when they approach the pharmacy? Consider the case of a male with prostate cancer. Under some conditions, the doctor may prescribe estrogen as part of the treatment. The other common case where a genetic male will take estrogen is to feminize their body as part of gender identity related therapy. Using the basic logic the pharmacist used in refusing to dispense a prescription to the young woman in question, the pharmacist could choose not to dispense the estrogen to the cancer patient on the grounds that it might be used as part of something that he morally disagrees with. Arguably, the pharmacist has made a significant error in professional judgement by projecting his moral framework onto his work as a professional.

Mr. Coren's article is substantially less subtle. It simply reeks of plain ignorance on the part of the author.

Quoth Mr. Coren:

The definition of "gender identity" is "one's internal sense of being male or female." Interesting. If I feel like a woman then I am a woman. What if I feel like a lion, a mouse or the emperor of China?

At a very superficial level, Mr. Coren's secondary questions about 'feeling like a lion' a perhaps mildly humorous. In reality, they demonstrate a distinct lack of understanding of the very valid, and real feelings that a transgender person experiences. While such a cynical, sarcastic style would be considered highly inappropriate by Mr. Coren himself were he talking about the experiences of someone grieving the loss of a loved one, he seems to have no problem with being belittling about it in this context. Why? Likely because he simply has chosen not to learn or understand the human realities of those around him, regardless of the gender and sexual orientation. I had just finished reading "The Sexual Spectrum" by Olive Skene Johnson when I encountered Mr. Coren's article. It is a book that Mr. Coren - and many others who jump to conclusions where issues of sexuality and gender expression are concerned - should read. It does a lovely job of disabusing one of any assumptions about the reality for people who are different. I cannot imagine jumping to any conclusions about someone (moral or otherwise) based on the sexual or gender orientation after reading that book - to do so would be gross disservice to the individual.

In both cases, these individuals are making moral judgements, largely based on assumptions that are at best incorrect, at worst, so badly flawed that they invalidate the reasoning that follows from those assumptions. Observationally, both Coren and the Pharmacist are relying on absolutes as laid out in scripture. Given that Christian scripture is between 2000 and 4000 years of age (depending on what section you are examining), it seems to me that the moral proscriptions made in those scriptures are reflective of society and human knowledge of that era. (The same applies to the Q'ran or the Torah (Talmud? - I get confused in the names)) The world has changed vastly since then in both the structure of the world, as well as the knowledge that we possess. Those that choose to continue to interpret the world in terms of 2000+ year old assumptions will continue to find their world view at odds with current reality. To blindly apply that logic, as the Pharmacist did; or to use it to self-justify belittling other people, as Coren has done, serves no useful purpose other than to demonstrate to the world how irrelevant such positions have become.