Shopkeepers of the World

Unite and take over Wal-Mart

by Alan Bisbort

Source: Hartford Advocate, April 7, 2005.

Buried deep inside the Terri Schiavo media circus was another major story that, though not unrelated, may have an even more far-reaching impact on the lives of American women — at least those American women who aren't brain dead. That is, reports have recently been made of pharmacists around the country refusing, on "moral and religious grounds," to fill prescriptions for birth control and so-called "morning after" pills. Doing so, these federally licensed shopkeepers have said, would be "violating their personal moral or religious beliefs."

This has been characterized by the mainstream press as "opening a new front in the battle over reproductive rights," but it is more than that. Emboldened by the attention garnered in their various crusades for posting the Ten Commandments, teaching Creationism in public schools (while censoring evolution teachings), executing retarded and teenage offenders, criminalizing homosexuality, and denying families the right to make decisions for their terminally ill loved ones, the extremist right wing has pushed their Taliban-inspired agenda into the mainstream with precious little resistance.

However, when this agenda ends up behind shop counters — as it has with these witless pharmacists — the battle lines have entered new and dangerous territory. If the nation's elected officials and consumers don't collectively push back, then the extremist agenda will simply, by default, become the mainstream. If you want to see what sort of world that would create, rent the film Vera Drake, Mike Leigh's brilliant, sad and sobering account of 1950s England.

Put aside, for a moment, the legal and ethical violations these shopkeepers are committing. Let's cut to the chase. What is really going on here? I believe it's this simple: The far right wing can't stand women. They can't stand young and unmarried women having sex. They can't even stand the idea of married women having sex with their husbands not intended to produce a (hopefully Aryan) baby. They want to intervene in every area of our lives, peruse what we read, scan what we watch, have a look at the photos we develop, poke their noses in our bank accounts and medical records.

This latest crusade started with Wal-Mart, whose policy states: "Wal-Mart does not carry emergency contraceptives. Our pharmacists may decline to fill a prescription based on personal convictions. However, they must find another pharmacist, either at Wal-Mart or another pharmacy, who can assist you by filling your prescription."

By this logic, a Wal-Mart employee in sporting goods who morally objects to killing animals for sport could refuse to sell guns to hunters. An environmentalist gas station attendant should therefore be allowed to refuse to pump gas into Hummers or SUVs, bookshop clerks should be able to refuse to sell copies of Tom Clancy novels because of "morally shitty writing," and vegetarian grocery store clerks could refuse to ring up meat purchases. Likewise, on "moral grounds," I could refuse to allow right-wing fundamentalists to read my column.

­ Last week's column prompted a letter to the editor from a PR flack at Bechtel Corporation objecting to my claim that Bechtel "hired GOP stalwart" (and former CIA director) William Casey, and supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein's regime. He called me "flat wrong" on "both counts" [see "What Do You Think?" page 5].

To respond, I must digress. It started 20 years ago when journalism schools began producing more publicists than journalists. Once ensconced in their jobs, these publicists reconfigured the journalist's dedication to "balance" to mean that provable facts could be "balanced" with — that is, given equal weight as — bald-faced lies. This seems to be the motive for Bechtel's loud and paranoid disavowals of all connections to Republican Saddam killing machines. It's surprising they're going to such lengths, since it only keeps the story alive so that more people can, as Bechtel's flack suggested "set the record straight" for themselves. The evidence of Bechtel's venality is so vast on this score that it would, as we say down South, "gag a maggot." It's far worse than I implied last week.

Check it out for yourself at, www.corpwatch.org

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reprinted from The Hartford Advocate