The Ontario Human Rights Commission has left no doubt on where it stands with respect to the issue of what role religion should play in the way doctors in that province practice medicine. There is no role for religion at all, nor, apparently, for the conscience of doctors as they practice their craft.
Over the long weekend, the Commission put up a post on its website. The document is the Human Rights Commissions’ formal submission to the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, regarding the draft policy covering the way doctors would interact with the new Ontario Human Rights Code.
Here’s part of the submission:
“It is the Commission’s position that doctors, as providers of services that are not religious in nature, must essentially ‘check their personal views at the door’ in providing medical care.”
Not only that, but the submission says that “a physician’s refusal to provide a service or accept a patient on the basis of a prohibited ground, such as sex or sexual orientation, is prima facie discrimination, even if the refusal is based on the physician’s moral or religious belief.’
Sean Murphey, the administrator of an organization call the “Protection of Conscience Project“, calls the draft policy an “iron fist in a velvet glove.” He says the recommendations are particularly scary because they are “backed up with the (very real) threat of prosecution before Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal.”
Public date: September 1st, 2008
