Back in my hard-news reporting days, I did more than my share of stories that I knew were going to make people angry. I knew that some of them would call the newsroom to complain to editors.
Welcome to the religion beat. On some stories there’s no way to make everybody happy. In fact, I learned that it was possible to do coverage that made people on both sides mad. This was especially true when covering topics linked to abortion, where there are often extreme activists on both sides — people who want their views in the newspaper and not the views of their opponents.
When covering this kind of story, I often knew that I would make both sides mad and that was a good thing, if it meant that I provided information that was crucial to the beliefs and arguments of “pro-livers” and “pro-choice” people.
That leads me to a recent story that was called to my attention by a longtime liberal reader of this blog. The headline: “MN woman sues two pharmacies for refusing to fill emergency contraception prescription.”
The woman at the heart of the story, 39-year-old Andrea Anderson, is a mother with five children who went to her doctor with an urgent request. Here’s the heart of the story:
Anderson’s doctor wrote a prescription for emergency contraception. She called ahead to Thrifty White Pharmacy, the only drug store in town, to make sure the morning-after pill would be available.
“You have five days to take it, so the clock was ticking,” Anderson said.
But in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Aitkin County, with the help of Gender Justice, a legal nonprofit, Anderson alleged the pharmacist George Badeaux refused to fill it based on his “beliefs” and “warned” against trying another nearby pharmacy.
Yes, we have the word “beliefs” in scare quotes. But this time around, that’s not the big problem here.
As the GetReligion reader noted: “Gonna guess religion had something to do with those “beliefs.” Just a hunch.”
Absolutely right. In this case, specific information about this pharmacist’s religious beliefs would be something that readers on the cultural right would want to know as well as those on the left. Are we talking about a religious tradition with specific teachings on this issue or is this pharmacist who is writing his own creed, so to speak.
Also, it would be crucial to know the beliefs of the owners of Thrift White Pharmacy. In a legal dispute, the religious convictions of the management would be on the line — as opposed to the personal beliefs of an individual member of the staff.
Is this relevant? Later in the story, there is this:
The pharmacy at Thrifty White said … that Badeaux is no longer working there. When reached via phone at his home, Badeaux said he couldn’t comment for legal reasons.
So was this pharmacist acting on his own, against the wishes — the religious beliefs even — of the pharmacy owner?
In this case, there’s no way to avoid facts linked to religion.
I predict, in the end, that people on both sides will end up angry — at one another and perhaps with journalists covering the story. That comes with the territory.
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