The two traditional symbols

of inevitability in this world are death and taxes, but I would like

to propose a third: If women are the main victims of a policy built

around basic bigotry, then the common sense objections to bigotry usually

trotted out by ostensible liberals will fly out the window. Witness

William "Lord" Saletan convincing himself yet again that he’s

a contrarian. Why? Because he behaves in a way predictable for men like him — self-satisfied

sexists so convinced of their own liberal nature that they don’t even

realize how sexist they can be — and rushes to defend pharmacists

who single out women for abuse in their pharmacies, refusing to fill

prescriptions for those patients doing deplorably female things like taking hormonal contraception.

My favorite part of his immoral defense

of the right for pharmacists to treat women with bigotry was when he excuses a pharmacist who

implies that a woman is a slut — or maybe even calls her a slut, because there’s bound to be a point

when purse-lipped refusals to provide basic pharmacy services won’t be satisfying enough and the word will have to be uttered.

Speaketh Lord Saletan:

Humiliation? Sorry, but

part of true equality is brushing off people who don’t respect you.

If the guy behind the counter won’t sell birth control, he’s the one

who should be embarrassed, not you. Walk out, and don’t come back.

First class evidence that Lord

Saletan thinks bigotry towards sexually active women doesn’t count

in the way other bigotries work. Imagine suggesting to civil rights

activists that the only proper reaction to widespread humiliations like

water fountains, lunch counters, and bathrooms marked "whites only"

was to walk out and mutter about how the bigot should be the one humiliated —

even as you know the bigot is the one preening over how awesome he is

because he showed the members of the hated class who’s boss.

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I like that part, but I also

like how he lies to make his point that the poor, poor pharmacists are

just religious rubes whose bigotry should be indulged by its targets.

He buys the false claim that anti-choice pharmacists are motivated by

the urban legend about birth control pills being abortions. Well,

yes, that’s what they like to say because it sounds a little less

bigoted than, "Really, I think that women are inferior to men and

should be forced to become pregnant against their will as punishment

for being sexual and really just for being women." Lord Saletan

plays along with the lie:

Because some pro-lifers

view hormonal contraception as potentially lethal. I don’t share their

anxiety about this theoretical risk to an early embryo, particularly

when the alternative, in the event of pregnancy, is a high likelihood

of fetal killing.

From the original

article Saletan is referencing:

But anyone who wants

condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive

will be turned away.

Emphasis mine. Anti-choicers

oppose abortion, birth control pills, and condoms because they all see

these as methods that sluts use to escape their fate ordained by God: Forced childbirth. They come up with

lies about killing "babies" to sell this belief to the public, but

the fact of the matter is that they haven’t figured out a way yet

to convince anyone that condoms are "abortion," and yet they still

won’t sell it at pharmacies. Saletan won’t admit a fact that

appears in the first paragraph of the article because it destroys

his pro-bigot argument grounded in "religious freedom" for pharmacists.

Admitting that the bigoted pharmacists in question are using religion

as a shield to hide their blatant misogyny and bigotry towards people

who don’t share their fundamentalist beliefs would destroy his argument.

Unfortunately, that’s the

truth of it. If a pharmacist refused to fill out a Viagra prescription

for a black man he saw walking around with his white wife, we would

have no problem seeing this behavior as bigotry, even if said pharmacist

claimed that Jesus told him to do it. But if a pharmacist refuses

to sell birth control pills to a woman who isn’t wearing a wedding

band, somehow that’s legitimate religious expression, even though

his rights are extending well past her nose. If Muslim pharmacists

started refusing to fill out prescriptions for Christians because those

Christians don’t share their beliefs, we would have no problem seeing

that the religious freedom pinched was that of the customer’s, not

the pharmacists.

But if the victims are singled

out because of sexism, then somehow society can’t see the bigotry.

If the victims of religious bigotry are specifically women, we don’t see them as the victims of religious intolerance

that they are. But that is exactly what they are. The pharmacists

see a prescription for birth control and feels that’s good evidence

that the woman in question needs to be punished for having different

religious beliefs than theirs. It’s not much different from

a fundamentalist Christian who humiliated and ejects you from his restaurant

because he glimpses a business card in your wallet indicating that you’re

an atheist. Or a gas station attendant who refuses to serve someone

he suspects of being Muslim.

Look, Pharmacists For Life

doesn’t even go to great pains to hide that this is about women and

hating women. When the bloggers

at Feministing criticized them, for instance,

Pharmacists For Life used a common misogynist term that suggests that the

belief that women are men’s equals is comparable to a belief in fascism that led

to the genocide of 12 million people. Is it about imaginary

babies or about punishing uppity women for thinking we’re equal?