Of conscience clauses and rutabagas.

I know nothing about Ben Woodfinden other than that he is a moron:

Woodfinden, along with many other intellectual adolescents, is outraged -- OUTRAGED, I TELL YOU!!! -- by the idea that grocery stores in New Brunswick are preparing to require shoppers to provide proof of vaccination. Tyranny, they shriek! Fascism, they howl! Medical apartheid, they snort furiously! And yet ... and yet ... this is the same kind of bullshit that the dingbats on the Religious Right have been foisting on us in the form of "conscience clauses" for years.

I suspect most of you already know about conscience clauses -- it proposes that anyone in any field can refuse service if it goes against their religious beliefs or offends their delicate moral sensibilities, as you can see in this 2009 snippet discussing that very thing in the U.S. with respect to the medical profession:

Conscience clauses have been used by medical professionals to refuse to perform abortions, and by pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control pills or the morning-after pill, simply because doing so would hurt their widdle religious feewings. And as for the argument that they are massively inconveniencing the general public, the retort is always, always, always the same:

"Hey, it's OK for us to refuse to accommodate you, you can always go to another hospital or pharmacy. Oh, we're the only one in town? Well, Shelbyville is just 23 miles down the road, so that's no big deal. Oh, they have the same policy? Gosh, that's too bad, sucks to be you."

The utter rubbish that are conscience clauses are nothing more than a sleazy and (sadly) government-endorsed way for the devoutly religious to impose their asinine religious beliefs on people whose lifestyle they disapprove of, which suggests that maybe those same people are the ones howling and whining about being prevented from buying their Hot Pockets, so maybe one can use the same logic on them:

"No, you can't shop here, but there's a No Frills on the other side of town, so it's not a problem. Oh, they closed three months ago? Well, I'd try the Loblaws in Shelbyville, then."

These people will, of course, howl that those situations are different and, ironically, they'd be right. There is at least a public health basis for refusing to allow the unvaccinated into a grocery store where they might spew virus all over the organic turnips, but there is absolutely no public health rationale for depriving people of health care related to their reproductive rights.

In any event, Ben, there's always the Loblaws in Shelbyville, right?