A Stitch in Haste

Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.
–Barry Goldwater

To review: In the absence of some legislative abomination, there is no right of government employees, who owe their livelihood to taxpayers, to claim a plenary “religious exemption” from one’s duties. If you find your job offensive, then you have one and only natural right: the right to quit.

We most recently saw this bizarre insistence that there is some sort of inexplicable “First Amendment right not to work” in California, where some low-level bureaucrats insisted that they should not be compelled to perform civil marriages, heretofore an unambiguous part of their job function, for gay couples. Even in the face of so much progress toward modernity — and a total absence of any precedent whatsoever for holding that “reasonable accommodation of religious views” includes allowing government employees to flat-out refuse to work — we still see that, where anti-gay bigotry is concerned, it is in fact the bigots who demand “special rights.”

And now we have Exhibit B:

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys filed a lawsuit Monday on behalf of a licensed counselor who was fired after referring a person seeking counsel with a same-sex relationship to a colleague.
…
On Aug. 21, 2007, a woman employed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sought counsel from [Marcia] Walden, a counselor at Computer Sciences Corporation, regarding a same-sex relationship. Walden explained that the client’s needs would conflict with her religious beliefs and that, therefore, it would be unfair for her to serve as the woman’s counselor. As a result, Walden referred the individual to a colleague.

After meeting with the client, Walden’s colleague told her that she had done “the right thing” by referring the woman to him. However, the client later filed a complaint against Walden which led to an investigation and religiously-based questioning from Walden’s supervisors, including pressure to hide her religious beliefs from future clients. She was later terminated as an employee.

The fact pattern is complicated only slightly by the fact that Walden’s nominal employer, Computer Sciences Corporation, was in fact retained by the CDC (i.e., the government) to provide counseling services. The analysis, however, remains unchanged: This bigot was under contract to taxpayers to provide a service. She refused to do her job and was fired for it. Where, exactly, is the lawsuit?

Also irrelevant is the insolent insistence that the bigot was “trying to do the right thing.” (The “far right thing” would be a better description.) I certainly wouldn’t want personal counseling from a homophobe. Point conceded. But people who wish to provide a service selectively, whatever their conscious or repressed reasons, should do so privately. Leave the taxpayer out of it.

On that last point: I have no opinion on whether the bigot has a valid lawsuit against CSC (her private employer), for breach of contract or any other cause of action. My only interest is with her and her ADF co-conspirators trying to drag the CDC (and thereby taxpayers) into this. Indeed six out the seven claims in the complaint (PDF - 19 pages) repeatedly emphasize that CSC and CDC have a “symbiotic relationship” and that this incident represents “governmental actors” somehow infringing her supposed right to refuse to work.

All the more reason to dismiss it outright as the obnoxious gobbledygook it is.