Supreme Court ruling crosses the line, critics say
The California Supreme Court ruled that patient demand for nonessential, electice care trumps physicians’ freedom of conscience and their ability to practice medicine in accordance with their religious or moral beliefs.
According to the court’s Aug. 18 ruling, physicians’ constitutional right to practice their faith doesn’t exempt them from following state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
That holds true, Justice Joyce L. Kennard wrote in the 18-page decision, “even if compliance poses an incidental conflict with the defendants’ religious beliefs.”
If a doctor wants to refuse a service on religious grounds, the court found, he or she must refuse all patients or provide a doctor who can provide the service to everyone. The decision comes only three months after the same court struck down a ban on same-sex “marriage.”
Catholics were quick to dispute the ruling.
“No one has the right to demand a nonemergency medical procedure from someone who finds that procedure morally unacceptable or religiously objectionable,” said Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry. “This case did not involve a life-and-death situation but only a possible inconvenience — one which required the patient to ‘walk across the office.’”
Guadalupe “Lupita” Benítez, a lesbian, filed suit after a San Diego-based clinic refused her a fertility treatment in 1999. The doctors, who are Christian, said that they denied the treatment because Benítez was unmarried, and that they were allowed to do so under the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion.
Kenneth R. Pedroza, who represented the doctors, said the ruling would probably cause many physicians to refuse to perform inseminations at all. Pedroza said his client did not violate the law because it did not bar discrimination on the basis of marital status in 1999. The state law has since been amended.
The Capitol Resource Institute, a California family policy advocacy group, said in a statement that “the California Supreme Court’s decision proves that these activist judges are willing to deny our First Amendment religious freedom in order to create rights for homosexuals.”
“This case starkly demonstrates the take-no-prisoners approach of the gay rights movement,” said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a legal defense organization specializing in the defense of religious freedom. “They will not stop until they have silenced or bankrupted every voice of conscience who disagrees with them.”
This article includes reporting from LifeSiteNews.com and Catholic News Service.