You know a society’s liberal credentials are in trouble when secularists look and sound more reactionary than those conservative Catholics.
By way of example, Susie O’Brien declares war on liberalism’s most hallowed freedom in today’s Herald Sun:
A recent Monash University survey shows one in five pharmacists think it’s reasonable for their religious beliefs to influence their decision to provide the pill.
Even the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia supports the right of individual pharmacists to dispense medicine in line with their personal morals, and not just their professional responsibilities.
Quite frankly, this is outrageous. Pharmacists should be bound by their professional codes of conduct and act in accordance with the law, and not in line with their own personal beliefs.
O’Brien then pursues something of a red herring in her arguments against moralising conservatives imposing their views. She completely ignores the elephant in the room. It’s called freedom of conscience.
O’Brien declared a few months ago in her column that women who abort their babies need feel no shame. She is a self-declared abortive woman and so of course she will defend contraception and say pharmacists should be forced to prescribe it.
There are plenty of studies to show the Pill is very harmful for mothers and fatal for embryonic children, so pharmacists might well use health reasons for not selling it, apart from the moral reasons which hardly anyone, including many Catholic women, would acknowledge.
We now have two generations of Catholics, the majority of whom are ignorant of the Church’s teaching on just about everything, including contraception. We can lay this dreadful state of affairs squarely at the bishops’ door.
She cannot appreciate the inconsistency of her position. Another child of the “reformation/Great Superstitio- er, “enlightenment”.
+ Wolsey
Fr John, I sent this to Herald Sun Letters Editor re Susie O’Briens comments but unfortunately they never print any of my letters.
“So Miss Susie O’Brien is again on the attack against Christians “No Sex please we’re chemists” this time Ms O’Brien wants Chemists to violate their own consciences in order to serve HER. Could I please remind Ms Obrien of other such individuals who demanded this? Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung (look at story about abortion in China in these last few days) shall I continue Ms O’Brien? Is this what you want? To play around with people’s consciences? not a good idea. I suggest you get off your platinum horse and learn to be human.”
Anne