Target discount stores has been embroiled in controversy over its policy of allowing its pharmacists to refuse to dispense valid emergency-contraception prescriptions by reason of “strongly-held religious beliefs”. They have stumbled further into trouble by citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act protections against religious discrimination as grounds for this position.

Joseph Hughes at Americablog has an excellent post taking them to task on this issue. He points out that this policy stance would presumably authorize any Target employee to engage in any offensive behavior toward any customer (er, “guest”), as long as they cited “religious beliefs” as justification.

Yes, apparently Target employees are allowed to not sell you things based on THEIR religion. That’s an absurd, and rather dangerous, legal statement from Target.

So let’s ask Target if they also support the following Target employees:
- Check out clerks who verify how fat you are before selling you that package of potato chips?
- Pharmacists who don’t want to fill prescriptions for Jewish customers who killed Christ.
- Pharmacists who don’t want to help customers who worship a “Satanic counterfeit” (read: “The Pope,” in fundie-speak).
- Pharmacists who only dispense HIV medicine to “innocent victims” of AIDS.
- Pharmacists who want proof that women seeking emergency contraception were really raped, and that they didn’t “deserve it.”
- Pharmacists (or cashiers) who are Christian Scientists - can they refuse to sell any medicine, even aspirin, to anyone?
- Pharmacists who won’t sell birth control pills to unmarried women, condoms to unmarried men, or any birth control at all because God doesn’t want people spilling their seed.
- Can fundamentalist Christian employees refuse to interact with gay people in any way, shape or form since gays are sinners, abominations, biological errors, and very likely pedophiles?

Amazingly, he got a response from a someone in the “Target Executive Offices” (apparently they don’t have job titles there), claiming that EC denial is the only form of religion-based personal offense they permit.

This pretty much blows their “Civil Rights Act” defense entirely out of the water. (There is no reason other forms of offense could not have the same religious basis as EC denial. If Target can prohibit its other employees from acting like jerks, the Civil Rights Act notwithstanding, it can also require its pharmacists to actually fill prescriptions.)

As Target notes, the Civil Rights Act requires that employers make “reasonable accomodations” for employees’ religious beliefs. It is hard to imagine that being allowed to refuse to do your job qualifies as a reasonable accomodation, or as the only accomodation that Target can adopt. They do say they will take steps to see that the prescription gets filled, but also specify that this may mean going to another pharmacy or waiting - which essentially means that EC denial means, in some cases, complete lack of access to the medication, if other pharmacies are not convenient or the waiting period exceeds the short window for taking the drug. Target could, instead, instruct its pharmacists to fill the prescriptions unless there is another person immediately available to perform that duty for them. The “reasonable accomodation” would then be to allow the employee to refuse to act as a professional as long as the patient was not harmed, but not to block access to medication in any circumstance. Target has chosen to put the burden on the patient to find a way to get around the Target employee’s restrictions, when a truly reasonable accomodation would guarantee the patient the care she needs and give the employee the option, but not the guarantee, of induling their personal religious inclinations at their own cost, not the patient’s. That Target has chosen the solution they have - while offering a legal justification that makes not the slightest sense and is undercut by their own policy regarding every other form of religious refusal - speaks volumes about their corporate values.

Clarence Thomas has called for less-in-depth examinations of federal judicial nominees’ views, to minimize the impact of the abortion issue on the judiciary.

Federal court appointments are being held hostage by the abortion issue, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Friday in advocating a briefer, less intrusive confirmation process.

Speaking to law students at the University of Alabama, Thomas said former clerks and other lawyers often tell him they’re not interested in federal judgeships because of the potential for bruising confirmation battles.

“I think that’s a problem when the stars are beginning to say, `Thank you, but no thanks,’” said Thomas.

Thomas, who opposes the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, said the fight he faced during his own confirmation hearings in 1991 went back to abortion politics. Thomas was accused of sexual harassment, charges he referred to at the time as a “high-tech lynching” for an “uppity” black man.

“I think we all should be honest with one another that the only issue, the central issue in all of this, is abortion. It’s not the other things that people throw out,” he said. “The whole judiciary now is being held, in a sense, hostage to that one issue.”

Without giving specifics, Thomas said the confirmation process should be scaled back and not allow for seemingly every aspect of a nominee’s life to be laid bare.

“We cannot say that all the examination of nominees has improved the court,” said Thomas.

It’s hard to say whether the courts have been helped or harmed - we don’t have the alternative course of history available for comparison. What is certainly true is that they have been shaped by the national debate over abortion - and that seems appropriate. Thomas is right that abortion is the tail that wags the dog, but that is true in electoral politics, cultural conflicts, and many other aspects of society. And it is, in the American legal system, a quintessential judicial issue - the status of abortion rights turns almost entirely on what the judiciary does, because restrictions on abortion rights fall at the interface between state powers and Constitutional guarantees of personal liberty. It would be strange if we did not put that issue in central place in decisions over staffing the judiciary.

We should note, too, that abortion has entered the judicial nomination fights largely by way of attempting to preserve women’s rights against right-wing assault. The judges who have faced questions over abortion have almost universally been the most extreme right-wingers. Thomas may pretend merely to be offering a suggestion for procedural efficiency, but he is really asking for a free pass for anti-choice extremists. And, as pro-choicers have always noted, the right wing can avoid fights over abortion by stopping nominating judges who are trying to take it away. Thomas does not want his right-wing patrons to stop their assault on women’s rights - he simply wants defenders of those rights to stop asking inconvenient questions about it.

What really got me, though, is this:

Thomas said he has never met a judge who attempted to impose a personal agenda through decisions . . . .

How about Scalia, and . . . Thomas? The two super-reactionary Catholics who are staunchly anti-abortion, and who in Scalia’s case can’t stop making public speeches about the role of religion in public discourse, and who have both announced their opposition to the Roe precedent (even if Thomas, idiotically, claimed he had never discussed it or thought about it before his Supreme Court confirmation hearing), just happen to be the two justices who have written dicta time after time begging the Court to overturn Roe and who have supported every conceivable restriction on women’s rights. But the fact that their personal agendas just happen to appear over and over in their judicial opinions is entirely coincidental . . . every single time.

Why do we allow someone so manifestly disingenuous on the Supreme Court? Thomas has been lying brazenly about his own beliefs and his role as a judge since before he was confirmed - lying in ways that don’t even sound like they might be true. His cynical suggestion to place abortion rights off the table is actually Thomas at his most upright. That he can make that suggestion in the same breath with a claim that he doesn’t know any judges with a personal agenda merely marks him as the buffoon he has always been.