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Yesterday, a federal court struck down a Washington state law that required pharmacies to dispense drugs such as Plan B and ella (which are widely regarded as abortifacients or abortion-inducing drugs). Several pharmacists had sued the government arguing that the state law infringed on their religious beliefs in violation of the First Amendment. The court agreed. Read the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty's press release here.
Having read many comments on this decision from people who have argued that pharmacists should be forced to violate their conscience in order to keep their jobs, I would respond thusly:
Should government have the power to tell any business what products it must sell and dictate the manner in which those products should be sold? Setting aside the idea of religious faith for a moment, do we want government to have the power to dictate the specifics of how every business has decided to serve its customers. Should a business be forced by government to spend its resources to purchase and stock a product regardless of whether there is customer demand? At stake here is also the principle of economic liberty and personal autonomy. A business should be free to decide what products it will choose to sell and which it will choose not to sell.
In most cases, businesses will make those decisions based on economic principles - a profit-motive and supply and demand (both of which should be viewed as noble considerations, not vilified as seems to be common in the current political culture). But in cases where a business person is concerned about more than profit and their values lead them to make a decision that is not driven by economics and in fact may run counter to the "best" economic decision, that business owner must be free to follow the dictates of their conscience.
Otherwise, we run the risk of letting government micro-manage every aspect of our economy, to dictate matters of supply and demand, to set prices, to govern the inventory decisions of each and every business. We have tried this in the past and with spectacular failures as a result. FDR demonized utility companies and pushed for government intervention and control - it drove America further into the depression. Nixon tried the same thing with price controls on oil and it lead to an energy crisis.
Ultimately, government should be the last entity to make these kind of decisions. Their track record is so poor we would be better off letting each business owner make their own decisions and letting the free markets reward business. This is a far better method for allocating capital resources (and birth control) than any government mandate.
UPDATE: Senator Jim DeMint has an excellent article in The Washington Examiner about the broader issues of ObamaCare and individual liberty. Read his commentary here.
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