The Rude Pundit - Fuck Your Conscience; Do Your Job

[ellennelle]

13. excellent point

one that could easily be extended to the police and even the military (though this latter can get a bit dicey); might an officer refuse to protect a prostitute who is being beaten by her pimp? might a soldier refuse to protect his buddy because the guy is muslim. (though obviously this latter, as noted, does get dicey; the entire military training enterprise based, as it is, on dehumanizing the enemy, 'other'-izing them, so war will 'work'. see krauts, japs, kikes, russkies, reds, sand monkeys etc. ad nauseam.....)

clearly, at the very least, professional organizations should be requiring conscience clauses of their own, ones that insist - as say, the medical profession does - that 'do no harm' is the fundamental and defining principle of all these professions of service. if you dream of being a firefighter or a doctor or a school nurse or a policeman or a pharmacist (even a dentist, fer chrissake), your oath should be always to serve those in need. period. end of discussion. then, if any of these jamooks want to defer first to their religious dictates, abandoning their professional oath, that's fine. but they then lose their license to practice, are fired from the force, are stripped of their front line active duties.

which would then beg the question: why did they take the oath in the first place? why did they even dream of serving others first, when their real allegiance is to an antiquated and inhumane religious cultic dictate?

but really, we need not go that far. why aren't these people being asked to apply the words of their supposed savior? i mean really; it's not that hard to determine what jesus would do in these instances.

the internal contradictions these people carry around in their heads day in and day out make my brain burn.

bottom line for approaching this problem, though, is we should be targeting the national and state professional organizations to threaten the licenses of the religious fanatics; the states that refuse should be denied acceptance at the national level, where we should apply the greatest pressure. i say this because as a psychologist, we went through years of hell getting the APA to impose a 'no torture' principle. it was the most shameful episode in my profession's history, and parallels could be drawn between that and what is happening with these religious fanatics. the APA was in bed with military for funding tons of research (much of it nefarious), and begging the congress to allow psychologists to prescribe drugs. the APA could justify this exception to 'do no harm' because they knelt at the altar of the almighty dollar.

and so it goes....