Tattoo? No help for you!Follow

What if you were to stick it in the temple's pooper? Would that be desecration?

Which explains why little Jewish babies are born without foreskins.

Are eyeglasses and vaccinations a sin also? how about heart transplants and blood transfusion? or any medicine at all?


Why do you worship in a man made building when the wide Earth that God has provided for you is there?

1. In a free market, any supplier can select their customers as they see fit, unless there are laws or regulations about minimum acccess rights. If a supplier behaves like an complete cUnt (as in this case), customers take their business elsewhere.

2. This is one of the reasons why I'm no longer a practising Christian. I don't want to be tarred with the same brush as this vindictive mrecenary piece of judgmental crap.

3. Few doctors graduating these days take the Hippocratic Oath.

4. I'm lucky enough to live in a state where (as well as having all essential healthcare paid for from General Taxation), our health professionals cannot refuse treatment on the basis of personal prejudice. If they want to work in State Healthcare, they treat anyone who has a legitimate need.

As for point 1, you have some rules (could he have refused to treat an Jew or an Brown Person? I suspect not).

Sadly, for every person who sees this article as a reason to avoid his practise, there'll be counterparts who choose it for the converse reason.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

of course not.

hmmm would that be desecration of the defecation ?

"Christian beliefs" is just a label in this case. And an irrelevant one at that. You may have your view as to what "christian beliefs" are, and the doctor may have a different set. In any case, the belief was *his*, which is realy all that matters. Whether his beliefs actually jibe with christian beliefs or not really isn't an issue here.

My concern here is where do we draw the distinction between saying that it's "fine" for him to have his own personal beliefs about something, but on the other hand say he has no right to judge her or her activities. It's either fine for him to do that, or it's not. If he has no right to judge her and change his behavior based on that judgement and (in this case) refuse her service as a result of that judgement, then it's *not* fine. You're essentially saying that it's wrong for him to hold those beliefs. So wrong that he's not allowed to express them, nor allowed any power/right to choose to allow or disallow things he disagrees with in his own private business.


I'm not particularly agreeing or disagreeing with your position on this. Just trying to point out that there are often inherent inconsistencies in how we view issues like this. We tend to laud individuality, free thought, and free expression, but not when those things end up expressing or acting on things that "we" don't agree with.

I also happen to personally believe that much of the dilemna with this type of issue is caused by an erosion of personal/property rights, not an increase in them. We've replaced those rights with "approved rights". And we've done that by trying to intervene when we see things we don't approve of as a group. To me, the consistency point is private ownership. He owns his own business. Thus, he has the right to decide how he spends his time, which patients he'll see. Etc. We get into this sort of problem via a slippery slope process (yup). If you have patients that some/many doctors don't want to treat, they complain. Instead of some industrius private individual realizing he's got a goldmine here helping the people that other doctors wont touch, we turn to the government to ensure their help (Note Smash's first thought on this issue). Well, that means that now the state doctors follow different rules then the private ones. The state guys can't turn you away cause they work for the government, not themselves. So now, you've increased the percieved differences and when a private doctor does do something like this, it creates more pressure to make all doctors work under the rules of the state to end the problem.

And thus, in the pursuit of the patient's "right" to have tattoos and piercings, we remove the rights of individuals to run their own private business (they're property) as they wish.


As much as many people disagree with this position, I really think we'd be vastly better off dealing with the idea that if you want service of some kind you might have to actually meet the requirements/whatever that those providing them want. While some might say that's some sort of violation of their rights, I really feel that the alternative is worse. It's one thing to say that you have to conform to a set of standards because other private citizens wont do busines with you otherwise. It's far far worse to have to conform to a set of standards because your government has decided that those standards are "the law". I'll take the first one every time...

Edited, Feb 16th 2007 3:56pm by gbaji

I don't think anyone who read the gospels could interpret this the way this doctor is. Trying to catch Jesus on technicalities like this didn't seem to go over terribly well with him.

Many people have HMO's which don't allow them to see any doctor but one. Of course, you just switch - but it may be one month, or so. In the interim, one could either go to the emergency room or there may be some general "urgent" care - often available only after standard office hours end and often have very long lines.

In the past I have had such insurance and been assigned to doctors without meeting them first. That said, this doctor may not participate in plans like that.

Hypothetically if this were the case, where you are assigned only one Dr, how do you go around this if you need a Dr but he refuses to see you?

Yep. If he gets enough complaints... a million or so, they'll drop him from the list and stop paying him.

I think you're misunderstanding. It would be misconduct for him to refuse services due to the patient's race, creed, color, or national origin...because those are protected classes. It would not be "professional misconduct" to deny services due to tatoos, being fat, being gay, or a midget...just not very nice.

Nexa