The two traditional symbols of inevitability in this world are death and taxes, but I would like to propose a third: If women are the main victims of a policy built around basic bigotry, then the common sense objections to bigotry usually trotted out by ostensible liberals will fly out the window. Witness William "Lord" Saletan convincing himself yet again that he's a contrarian. Why? Because he behaves in a way predictable for men like him -- self-satisfied sexists so convinced of their own liberal nature that they don't even realize how sexist they can be -- and rushes to defend pharmacists who single out women for abuse in their pharmacies, refusing to fill prescriptions for those patients doing deplorably female things like taking hormonal contraception.

My favorite part of his immoral defense of the right for pharmacists to treat women with bigotry was when he excuses a pharmacist who implies that a woman is a slut -- or maybe even calls her a slut, because there's bound to be a point when purse-lipped refusals to provide basic pharmacy services won't be satisfying enough and the word will have to be uttered. Speaketh Lord Saletan:

Humiliation? Sorry, but part of true equality is brushing off people who don't respect you. If the guy behind the counter won't sell birth control, he's the one who should be embarrassed, not you. Walk out, and don't come back.

First class evidence that Lord Saletan thinks bigotry towards sexually active women doesn't count in the way other bigotries work. Imagine suggesting to civil rights activists that the only proper reaction to widespread humiliations like water fountains, lunch counters, and bathrooms marked "whites only" was to walk out and mutter about how the bigot should be the one humiliated -- even as you know the bigot is the one preening over how awesome he is because he showed the members of the hated class who's boss.

I like that part, but I also like how he lies to make his point that the poor, poor pharmacists are just religious rubes whose bigotry should be indulged by its targets. He buys the false claim that anti-choice pharmacists are motivated by the urban legend about birth control pills being abortions. Well, yes, that's what they like to say because it sounds a little less bigoted than, "Really, I think that women are inferior to men and should be forced to become pregnant against their will as punishment for being sexual and really just for being women." Lord Saletan plays along with the lie:

Because some pro-lifers view hormonal contraception as potentially lethal. I don't share their anxiety about this theoretical risk to an early embryo, particularly when the alternative, in the event of pregnancy, is a high likelihood of fetal killing.

From the original article Saletan is referencing:

But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away.

Emphasis mine. Anti-choicers oppose abortion, birth control pills, and condoms because they all see these as methods that sluts use to escape their fate ordained by God: Forced childbirth. They come up with lies about killing "babies" to sell this belief to the public, but the fact of the matter is that they haven't figured out a way yet to convince anyone that condoms are "abortion," and yet they still won't sell it at pharmacies. Saletan won't admit a fact that appears in the first paragraph of the article because it destroys his pro-bigot argument grounded in "religious freedom" for pharmacists. Admitting that the bigoted pharmacists in question are using religion as a shield to hide their blatant misogyny and bigotry towards people who don't share their fundamentalist beliefs would destroy his argument.

Unfortunately, that's the truth of it. If a pharmacist refused to fill out a Viagra prescription for a black man he saw walking around with his white wife, we would have no problem seeing this behavior as bigotry, even if said pharmacist claimed that Jesus told him to do it. But if a pharmacist refuses to sell birth control pills to a woman who isn't wearing a wedding band, somehow that's legitimate religious expression, even though his rights are extending well past her nose. If Muslim pharmacists started refusing to fill out prescriptions for Christians because those Christians don't share their beliefs, we would have no problem seeing that the religious freedom pinched was that of the customer's, not the pharmacists.

But if the victims are singled out because of sexism, then somehow society can't see the bigotry. If the victims of religious bigotry are specifically women, we don't see them as the victims of religious intolerance that they are. But that is exactly what they are. The pharmacists see a prescription for birth control and feels that's good evidence that the woman in question needs to be punished for having different religious beliefs than theirs. It's not much different from a fundamentalist Christian who humiliated and ejects you from his restaurant because he glimpses a business card in your wallet indicating that you're an atheist. Or a gas station attendant who refuses to serve someone he suspects of being Muslim.

Look, Pharmacists For Life doesn't even go to great pains to hide that this is about women and hating women. When the bloggers at Feministing criticized them, for instance, Pharmacists For Life used a common misogynist term that suggests that the belief that women are men's equals is comparable to a belief in fascism that led to the genocide of 12 million people. Is it about imaginary babies or about punishing uppity women for thinking we're equal?

Saletan pooh-poohs the effects of pharmacy refusal on the quality of women's lives. How widespread could this practice get? Well, in the cities, women probably always will be able to get services. But as Deborah Kotz notes, a lot of rural communities only have one pharmacy, and quite a few of them might be facing pressure from local churches to start treating female customers like they're second class. Certainly we have a long national history showing that it's not difficult to get entire communities to comply with bigoted policies that alienate a huge percentage of the local population. That's not only what segregation was about but also more recent culture war battles--creationism in schools, abstinence-only programs, and even, when I was growing up, the banning of MTV from local cable providers in the panhandle of Texas. That history suggests that it would actually be pretty easy for powerful churches in rural communities to deprive all the women of contraception with a few strategic demonstrations of pressure on local pharmacies.