DOCS' BELIEFS DON'T COUNT

On Monday, August 18, the California Supreme Court ruled that doctors may not follow their consciences when deciding whether or not to participate in the artificial insemina-tion of a female homosexual. Instead, medical institutions are obliged to either quit offering fertility services or to participate in a process whose goal is to produce a child within a fatherless, same-sex household.

The ruling was delivered in a case brought by an Oceanside woman who, in 2001, was offended when doctors at the Vista-based North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group referred her to a facility that didn’t exhibit moral scruples about bringing children into the world under the aforementioned circumstances. From now on that same moral indifference to marriage and child welfare has become mandatory in California.

News stories generally portrayed this ruling as a “civil rights” victory for gays and minimized or ignored the religious freedom and child welfare issues. “Docs can’t refuse gay patients” is a headline that fits this template—as if doctors weren’t treating sick individuals because they were gay or as if a potential child (as abortion absolutists would have it) falls in the same category as a malignant tumor.

A similar state court ruling was handed down over two years ago in Massachusetts. In that case Catholic Charities of Boston was given a drop-dead ultimatum that required the charity to offer gay adoptions or to get out of the business. The 100-year-old organization chose the latter option—to the detriment of special-needs kids the group regularly placed in caring homes.

The basis for the California Court’s unanimous ruling against individual conscience was state legislation that “imposes on business establishments certain antidiscrimination obligations.”

Observers who applaud the court’s interpretation of state law typically equate this judgment with rulings against racial discrimination. This analysis clearly ignores natural and complementary differences between males and females that don’t correspond to superficial racial distinctions. To an unprejudiced eye, these sexual differences demand respect—especially when it comes to child-rearing.

Political correctness, however, demands that we close our eyes to the obvious for the sake of “tolerance.” This “tolerance,” however, requires inflexible acceptance of the view that men and women are essentially interchangeable, that marriage is no big deal, and that fathers, in particular, are irrelevant when it comes to a child’s psychological development.

In short, modern tolerance is “intolerance.” Accordingly, the state won’t allow professionals to act on defensible moral principles contrary to the feels-good secularism that’s become an unofficial state religion—a faith promulgated relentlessly by our pop-culture.

Thus, the “free exercise” of religion in California now means the freedom to believe what you want, provided you leave those beliefs in the pew. At work, as the state Supreme Court bluntly put it, those convictions may be ignored as “incidental” conflicts with Sacramento’s social engineering project.

The licentious state religion that now permeates public schools will be intolerantly enforced throughout society (even among private organizations) if Californians no longer give a rip about freedom of conscience.