Kathryn Jean Lopez laments a poll that says that more-or-less 80% of the public believes that pharmacists ought to be legally required to fill prescriptions that they find morally objectionable. In this case, the birth control pill.

Fairweather libertarian Glenn Reynolds, however, disagrees. That's not a surprise. What is a surprise, however, is that he is using libertarian ideals to do so:

Of course, this only matters because pharmacists enjoy a government-created monopoly on the dispensing of prescription drugs. Just take that away, and the problem disappears, too. In the meantime, like others who enjoy government monopolies, they are forced to make some concessions to public convenience. That doesn't strike me as an overwhelming imposition, but if the pharmacy profession feels otherwise, I'll be the first to support a move to eliminate its privileged position.

I'm afraid the not even the libertarian in me can buy this argument. In fact, it's the libertarian in me that musters the most opposition to it.

In my mind, this has little to do with birth control pills - the existence of which I support. This also is not about someone else imposing their morality on someone else. This is simply a case of the government imposing the morality of some (in this case the FDA and woman seeking birth control) on others (namely, those that object to it). Reynolds's rationale is, in my mind, a cop-out.

The first question is whether or not we have a right to drugs that we recieve a prescription and the money for. That's an iffy statement, but even if we grant that right that does not translate into forcing someone to do business where they don't want to. Reynolds suggests that because the pharmacists are licensed by the state, they are agents of the state and therefore the government should be able to have this sort of control over them. I would agree with this if, and only if, the government hand-selected who could and could not be a pharmacist or partitioned pharmacists over a particular area as they do with television and radio frequencies or phone companies. But if one pharmacist will not fill birth control pills, another one can open shop and do it instead. The "monopoly" of which Reynolds speaks applies to accredidation boards. If an accredidation board were to prevent pharmacists from filling out certain prescriptions, I'd completely be on board.

But the logic that Reynolds applies to pharmacists could be applied to any number of people in any number of ways. It could require, for instance, that doctors perform abortions even if they don't want to. After all, they're a "monopoly" too, right? It could even require doctors to perform euthanasia if it were to become legal, no matter how opposed they are to it. To bring it back to pharmacists, it could require them to fill prescriptions for morning after pills or even suicide pills were they to be legalized. I'm not sure what to call that, but liberty it is not.

Liberty, as some like to say, is not license. This distinction is one that libertarians themselves often use when people advocate making something which they see as immoral into something illegal. What keeps liberty from becoming license, however, is societal disapproval. That which remains legal mustn't always be tolerated. Society's disapproval for certain behavior helps keep some in line. The only sanctions we have against, for instance, marital infidelity are social. And whether we agree with their disapproval or not (and I disagree with doctors that won't prescribe birth control and pharmacists that won't hand it over), we should not force them to become complicit in the acts they abhor.

I don't like being judged. Nor do I like to be inconvenienced by the preferences of others as I was with the smoke-free music shows in Houston. I would very likely boycott a pharmacist that believed he knew what was right for me. Not just for the things they wouldn't sell me, but for the things they would sell me, too. They have their choices and I have mine. That is liberty.