EDITORIAL – Target lets employees deny EC

What is going on in consumer America?

While the once quasi-conservative Wal-Mart is selling… What is going on in consumer America?

While the once quasi-conservative Wal-Mart is selling vibrators, the supposedly more progressive and more expensive Target is empowering their employees with the choice to refuse to sell emergency contraception to customers if it runs against their religious beliefs.

And what’s even more of an abomination is that this “right to refuse” at the expense of someone else is not specific to emergency contraception; it involves practically anything an employee could muster as long as it conflicts with his or her religion.

Will Mormon bartenders soon refuse to sell liquor during happy hour because of their sentiments regarding prohibition? Will Catholic cashiers soon object to ringing up someone’s R-rated DVD because of gratuitous sex and violence? In what world do you get a pass to discriminate and not do your job all at the same time?

Apparently, the one we’re living in. But maybe if we endured the grueling two weeks of an employee seminar, we would understand.

What right do these companies have to empower people to be the morality police at these stations of their profession? Well, the argument on the other side seems to be citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In this idiotic interpretation of civil rights, Target, and several small-town pharmacies, have given the religion of their employees free reign over customer service and any other policies by which they choose not to abide.

Who would have thought civil rights would ever be used to discriminate against people? The interesting thing about the politics of this once-lauded business is that they have laced themselves in a strikingly serendipitous catch 22.

Target claims that they are indeed filling prescriptions because those with moral or religious objections must refer their prescription to someone else who must then “ensure that the guest’s prescription is filled in a timely and respectful manner,” said a response from Target on Americablog.org. They also continued to say, “If it is not done in this manner, disciplinary action will be taken.”

They conveniently didn’t comment about what happens when no one on staff is able to fill the prescription. Furthermore, for the employee in question, isn’t referring EC an act of enabling behavior?

What’s going to happen to the foundation of Target’s decision when it’s used by an employee to sue the pants off them after they are “disciplined” for what they feel is enabling the termination of a possible pregnancy by referring someone to do the very thing to which they morally object?

But the fact still remains that you can’t accuse an employer for refusing to hire you to do a job you refuse to do. And then there is still the problem of a company that benefits from any tax refunds from the federal government who engages in this blatant act of discrimination against people who don’t hold certain religious beliefs.

It seems that this problem is about misinterpretation of laws and what it means to enjoy your rights of freedom to religion. There is a difference between being religiously sensitive and allowing people to project their religious beliefs on a customer base at large.

Those who cannot maintain this level of professionalism or simply do what they were hired to do – their job – must pursue work elsewhere. There are streets that need to be cleaned, floors that need to be mopped and garbage that needs to be taken out without any worry of religious obligations.