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.
