Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Religious Nuts Are Ruining Our Country

We all know that Republicans like to take credit for being the caretakers of 'American, Judeo-Christian-style morality in our country. Yet case after case shows that the only morality they act out of is their own fear.

Imagine being a young woman walking to your car and a man jumps out at you, drags you off the street and rapes you behind an intersection. It is one of the most traumatic things one person can do to assert power over another human being. Only in the case of a particular woman in Tampa on Saturday night this was only the beginning of her nightmare.

The hospital had done a standard exam and prescribed her a morning-after pill, followed by the police coming in to do their standard investigation. When they pulled up her record a paperwork-snafu from four years ago showed she had an arrest warrant for not providing resitution in a case as a juvenile.

So what did the cops do? Vigoriously work to find the rapist and bring him to justice? No, instead they hauled her off to jail:


...the woman was put in handcuffs and taken to jail. She was not allowed bond, and the medical staff at the jail refused to give her the Morning After Pill even though it had been prescribed at the hospital.

"The medical supervisor would not allow her to take the pill because she said it was against her, the supervisor's, religion. So, here we have a medical supervisor imposing her beliefs on a rape victim," claimed the victim's attorney Virlyn Moore. "As a human being, how someone could be so violated by this monster and then the system comes along and rapes her again psychologically and emotionally - it's outrageous and unconscionable."


So a rapist now runs free while the raw trauma of a rape is compounded by the 'morality' of the prison' medical staff. Who are they to deny her the rights of an American citizen? How is it that religious beliefs can be imposed on another in a public institution, especially that of a rape victim? This is a phenomenon that needs to be stopped cold in it's tracks. If an individual does not believe in secondary contraception, then don't take it for yourself. But in America, that is where it should stop. We are a land that was founded with liberty in mind, not religious persecution of others.