religion and profession
osewalrus posted an excellent essay on conflicts between religion and one's profession. He and I agree: you are completely free to practice your religion, but if doing so causes complications in your life, you -- not the rest of society -- need to deal with that.
I think everyone wins if a person in this situation can focus on serving people who share his morality. I have no more problem with the idea of Catholic (or Jewish or Muslim or Wiccan or...) medical practices than I do with such schools. People aren't all the same, and there's nothing wrong and quite a bit good with forming voluntary associations to meet the needs of a specific community. (This does not mean becoming insular, as it's not likely to affect all areas of life.)
The problem with "X hospitals" or "Y schools" or "Z pharmacies" arises when they're the only option. So long as there's a "public" or "secular" option, people can self-select into the specialization wihtout harming anyone else. There are parts of the country where I suspect that religious institutions would be in danger of being the only options (that is, there'd be no public hospital, just the Catholic one -- ok, Evangelical in the places I'm thinking of), but this is just a different form of the underserved-communities problem. (It's the same as when no one's willing to open a grocery store in the bad part of town.) I don't have a good solution to that; I merely point out that it's a broader problem.
She is Catholic and only realized later, when she came out of the traumatic daze of having being raped, what had happened. She didn't have the choice to even choose her morality.
That's really sad.
Should there come a point in the future where the majority of Americans feel that it is immoral to circumcise, is the answer for all Jews and Muslims and anyone else who would like to circumcise their son to move out of the US?
You know me; I don't think this is government's business. Given that, private practice will continue even if more and more hospitals say they won't offer the service any more. (And anyway, people who care about religious circumcission won't use the hospitals for it anyway.) So that wouldn't be a problem. If that pressure leads to a ban on circumcission, that's the same kind of problem as any other attack on civil liberties and personal freedom.
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