The boycotters are reacting to the mistreatment of the original customers.
No–the problem was the clerk wanting to impose their religious ideas on others. The boycotters are just saying “Hey, that was wrong!”
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It’s only “mistreatment” when you presume that your standards are more important than the store/employee’s standards, even when you’ve ventured onto their turf.
You yourself said that your right to swing your fist stops at someone’s nose. The customer was the one shoving their (lack of, to the clerk) religious morals in the clerk’s face.
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On the street, sure. In a retail store that sells the product you are trying to buy – not so.
It’d be one thing if Walgreens pulled those products off the shelves entirely, or at least distinguished the employees willing or unwilling to sell the product somehow. It’s another to allow any employee refuse a sale. As it is now, the customer has no idea whether the employee will be offended by their purchase. The employee is the offender, not the customer.
By the way, since the policy says to refer to another employee or manager, does that mean that all managers are required to sell condoms and birth control? And by extension, a religious zealot would not be allowed to become a manager? That’d be a problem for WG. Or they’d have to always have at least one employee in-store willing to sell those products at all times.
I’m curious to understand why Walgreens has taken this position. I know why the Little Sisters of the Poor, Arlene’s Flowers, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and Hobby Lobby have their positions. But I would think Walgreens would be the type of retail outlet that could tell their employees, “sell all of our products or take a hike.” Generally speaking, I believe it’s the job of the employee to find a job at a place where they don’t have a problem selling the goods or providing the service that the business choses to sell. I wouldn’t try to work for Philip Morris, Hustler, or Planned Parenthood and then refuse service to make cigarettes, take pictures of people having sex, or dismember unborn babies. I know this isn’t exactly equivalent, but there is some overlap. I would think there are plenty of places for “orthodox” catholics to be cashiers where they don’t have to sell condoms. But as far as pharmacists and birth control - why did they become pharmacists in the first place? How long has Walgreen’s had this policy? Did they know in pharmacy school they would be able to find a job at a pharmacy where they wouldn’t have to fill birth control scripts? Is that a thing? Is there an “Orthodox Catholic Pharmacy Students United” group in medical schools where they advise each other on this stuff?
I guess what I am saying is, I can see a mom and pop place with a small job applicant pool in some parts of the country (whether very left or very right) considering this sort of policy. But I can’t really see why the country’s largest pharmacy chain, which is publicly traded, has chosen to implement this policy. Does Kroger have a policy requiring them to hire Indian butchers that refuse to handle raw beef or Kosher Jewish fishmongers that refuse to handle shellfish? I wouldn’t think so.
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They chose to work at a store that sells such products, they’re the ones doing the pushing.
You do not get to scream discrimination when people react to your attempts to push religion on them.
Gotta love the equivalence the author draws here 
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Shopkeepers refusing service to anyone who doesn’t meet their approval might sound like something that happens to other people in other places. A relic from the bad old days of segregated lunch counters and bigoted bakers who refused to decorate gay wedding cakes.
Yes, middle aged white lady from Minnesota - a gay couple being offered hundreds of free cakes and pro-bono legal services after seeking out a baker they knew would deny their request is absolutely the same as the oppression a whole race of people suffered in nearly half the country for 100 years.
The funny part is, the column wasn’t terrible until it got to the part where the author decided to publish the patron’s baseless belief that the clerk would have sold condoms to her husband. Then she decies sexism speculation wasn’t enough, and had to make sure she compared the clerk to racists and homophobes as well.
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What happened to “it’s a private business, they can allow and not allow anything they want”?
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Again, the customer is the one doing the pushing. The clerk is only reacting to the customer. So yeah, you are correct, but have the context twisted.
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That “anything” does not include discrimination, pushing religion on customers, or embarrassing customers based on their purchases. I was replying to your assertion that the customer is the offender, while in this situation customer couldn’t possibly be the offender since they can’t tell the friendly from unfriendly employees.
The customer, by attempting to pay for something the store has on the shelves, is not doing any pushing. It is ridiculous to say that he is. Perhaps if there was a separate register for those items or a different uniform for employees who can sell those items, I might agree with you.
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The clerk is the one deviating from the normal model, they’re the one doing the pushing. One should not be working at a job that one is unwilling to perform some routine aspects of it!
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Yet when someone is offended by something I say or do, I’m the one who’s guilty of being insensitive despite my having no clue who around me may or may not be offended by such things…
If it’s not clear, we’ve had to listen to this same argument for years when you’ve been the one offended, yet now it’s flipped completely opposite when someone finds you offensive. (And yes, I mean a generic you as in your side, not you personally). It’s about the hypocrisy of the rationales used to maintain the “I’m right and your wrong and how dare anyone suggest otherwise” attitude.
The customer is literally putting something the clerk finds offensive right under his nose. You’ve spent years insisting…nay, demanding…that one must take responsibility for showing such insensitivity towards those around them. Until the shoe is on the other foot, and you are suddenly incurring the same lunacy as you’ve been imposing.
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Walgreens might have less shrinkage.
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Yeah, I was kind of impressed, but flabbergasted. I wonder if it has anything to do with the available talent pool. That’s all that I can guess. I never thought of Walgreen’s as particularly “employee friendly”, but they may be.
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You’re making zero sense, so you’ll need to be more specific about how someone being offended by what you say or do is similar to this case. Because in this situation the customer is doing exactly what a customer should and can do – taking a product off a shelf and bringing it to the register. If the clerk is offended by this action and is incapable of following the store policy, then he needs to find another job. Otherwise the presence of the product on the shelf is a sort of entrapment.
I actually agree with you guys on this. But maybe I can help with what you’re missing from @glitch99 's point.
This policy from Walgreens likely stems from “acceptance” extremism - which, as @glitch99 correctly points out, was started by the left and is now commonplace. When activists start telling companies that they need to accept the feels of all of their workers - if their male worker feels like a woman, that worker should be allowed the workplace rights of a woman - you shouldn’t be surprised when people with “right wing” feels start to use that same logic to demand their own workplace accommodations.
I don’t think a person who doesn’t feel right selling condoms should choose to work at a store where they will have to sell condoms during the course of their regular job duties. That person should work at Hobby Lobby - a nationwide employer that clearly has similar values and convictions. But I also don’t think a male that feels like a woman (whatever that means) should work for a funeral home* where the owners think that grieving families going through the hardest times of their lives shouldn’t also have to deal with a mentally ill man dressing as a woman while handling those arrangements.
*These were the facts of the SCOTUS Case R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission which was rolled in with Bostock which expanded Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protects transgender people from employment discrimination
See what your side started?
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That’s exactly how we’ve felt the past few years, with all the nonsensical crap you’ve been shoving in our faces. But I’ll let meed’s post speak for me, as he broke it down quite well.
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What you don’t realize is that the trans issue has been going on a long time, it wasn’t an issue until it came out of the closet and the right started causing trouble with it. There have always been people with the wrong anatomy in the restrooms, they weren’t causing problems, nobody noticed.
Exactly - it wasn’t a problem until people started demanding that it be a right. I’m pretty sure I’ve asked here numerous times - with the privacy of a bathroom stall, how does anyone even know what you are anatomically to be able to complain about it? As meed said, it’s only become such an issue because of the demand we openly accommodate such feelings. But only if you feel the right feelings, otherwise you get excommunicated for your feelings.
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HAHA. You’re seriously telling me there is something I don’t realize about the trans issue? You don’t read my posts on this forum if you think that’s the case. Now please, stop trying to rewrite history. The trans activists on the left made it an issue way before the conservative right even knew it was a thing. The first people/groups to bring the issue to courts and legislatures were the leftist trans-activists.
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The parents of Coy Mathis sued their kid’s school district to allow him to use the girls bathroom in elementary school. In 2013, the leftist Colorado Civil Rights Division ruled in favor of Mathis.
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In early 2016, the City of Charlotte rewrote its law requiring people to use the bathroom according to their sex and changed it to gender identity.
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In 2014, the ACLU began supporting Gavin Grimm in her fight to use boys bathrooms. In 2016 the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the District Court that had read “sex” in Title IX correctly and based it on biological sex.
It wasn’t until these wins by transgender activists that the right even began to mobilize in the transgender fight. Don’t pretend that republican bathroom bills came first. Bathroom bills were a response to what the trans-activists and their leftist supporters in the courts and legislatures were doing. Are you just upset that public opinion on this hasn’t shifted to your side in the same way it has for the redefinition of marriage?
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