Pervert Pharmacists
Last night at 1:30 a.m. I called up a Fry’s Pharmacy in Arizona and asked, “Why wouldn’t you provide the morning-after pill to a rape victim who needed it?” I did this because I was instructed to do at the end of a free newspaper sex advice column that counted among this week’s topics: How to spot a diaper fetishist in your workplace. But of course, Savage Love is so much more than a syndicated alternative newspaper sex advice column, it’s one of the few repositories of sanity in an increasingly insane world, which is why when Dan Savage says, “Call this pharmacy in Arizona and yell at them,” I do so.
What is a Fry’s anyway? Is that like a WaWa or some other exotic retailer located in a State That Is Not New York? Last time I was out west I noticed a chain of roadside convenience stores pornographically called the Kum & Go. In Chicago when you need ice for a party or a quart of milk you go to The White Hen. Why are the names of conveninence stores so mysterious and state-specific and why do teenagers like to hang out in front of them so much, and why is it always the ones with the strangest facial hair who do? And what, exactly, is a pharmacist? A pharmacist, as far as I can tell, is a drug dealer in a polyester vest who sells all the wrong drugs for the worst kind of corporate druglords. Seinfeld pointed out that the pharmacist stands on a platform that puts him three inches higher than everyone else, really for no reason at all.
Maybe the three-inch elevation in the pharmacist’s status has led to an unwarranted superiority complex, because some pharmacists have taken it upon themselves to deny women the medicines they need to make the choices that are nobody’s business but their own. These pharmacists claim that they should be able to refuse to dispense the morning-after pill if it goes against their religious beliefs. Even if, as in the case of the Fry’s pharmacy, the store stocks the drug. If the pharmacist on duty believes that the morning-after pill constitutes an abortion and therefore doesn’t want to dispense it, they can refuse to do it. So if you’re going to get raped, please have the decency to do it when a heathen pharmacist is on duty. Because you can only exercise what rights are still available to you in this country when the whims of your government–and now your local pharmacist–permit.
And if God forbid you just want to have consenual sex, which is what really makes you a whore in the eyes of the pious, well, if the man in the polyester vest thinks you should suffer the consequences of your sinful acts, then Ye Shall Bear the Child of Your Profane Union. Because the only person I’d rather invite into my bedroom and my pants more than the Bush Administration is the local fucking pharmacist.
The number of Fry’s pharmacy coprorate offices (to whom they are referring all complaints about their willingness to employ a pharmacist who would not dispense the legal drugs they stock to a rape victim) is (623) 907-4932. The other company who allows their pharmacists to rewrite the law according to their private religious beliefs is Target.
Religous beliefs=private. Women’s bodies=public. Sounds like America to me.
Sometimes you have to do what you think is right, even if it is not popular. Sometimes you cannot go against your beliefs to get along. We are all sinners. I don’t appreciate having someone else’s life choices or beliefs forced upon me so I try not to do that to others. But I don’t think I could assist someone else in doing something I thought was wrong just because my employer told me to do so. If you’re raped and want the morning after pill wouldn’t you be in a hospital anyway? And wouldn’t that hospital have a large enough pharmacy staff that such a drug could be dispensed? Morality means different things to different people. Some may be concerned about the pharmacist imposing their morality on a customer, but why should the customer impose hers on the pharmacist?