Filed Under ‘R’

File this under ‘R’ for ‘Render unto Caesar’.

A federal appeals court has ruled that pharmacists have to do the job they were hired for and don’t get to pick and choose which prescriptions they fill based on their personal opinions.

Specifically, pharmacists can’t refuse to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they believe that contraception = abortion = killing innocent preborn babies.

The right to freely exercise one’s religion “does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability,” the 9th Circuit panel wrote.

The plaintiffs in the case argued that being required to dispense the Plan B pill violated their First Amendment right to “free exercise of religion”. The counterargument is that imposing their religious beliefs on the pharmacy’s customers violated the customers’ First Amendment right to freedom from other people’s religious rules. By upholding the customers’ rights, the Court upheld the “original intent” of the First Amendment to protect us from having religious authority imposed upon us.

Friday Cat Blogging

Lesson: They’ll cave for the GOP. They’ll also cave for us.

There’s nothing mysterious about the Blue Dogs. They’re opportunists, people who love the high salaries and great bennies of working in Washington. If you want to get their vote, threaten to upset their happy little nirvana by facing a primary. That’s the lesson to be learned from this one. From Brian Beutler of TPM:

Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)–a key Democratic hold out on the question of a public option–is starting to cave. In an op-ed in today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Lincoln echoes the party line–“Health care reform must build upon what works and improve inefficiencies”–then breaks with her old position: Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.

We’d rather they were Democrats by nature, but if they can be beaten into shape, they’ll do.