Legal News

California: Docs Can?t Refuse to Treat Gays on Basis of Religious Beliefs

By Dan Slater

Guadalupe Benitez, center, her partner, left, her son, foreground, and her attorney Jennifer Pizer, right, at a news conference in downtown San Diego, Aug. 18, 2008. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)

Continuing to blaze the way through gay rights law, the California Supreme Court decided yesterday that doctors may not discriminate against gays and lesbians in medical treatment, even if the procedures being sought conflict with religious beliefs. Here are reports from the L.A. Times and the Recorder.

“The 1st Amendment’s right to the free exercise of religion does not exempt defendant physicians here from conforming their conduct to the . . . antidiscrimination requirements,” Justice Joyce L. Kennard wrote for the court. Here’s the opinion.

Here’s what happened in the case: Guadalupe Benitez, a lesbian who lives with her partner and wants to become pregnant with donated sperm, filed a suit after Dr. Christine Brody said she wouldn’t perform an intrauterine insemination. In her lawsuit, Benitez alleged that Brody said her religious views prevented her from providing the procedure to a lesbian. Benitez also claimed that another physician at the clinic told her that the staff was uncomfortable helping her conceive a child.

The doctors denied the allegations. Brody said she would not perform the procedure on any unmarried woman, heterosexual or homosexual.

The court said the doctors’ constitutional rights to freedom of religion did not trump the state anti-discrimination law because the state has a compelling interest in ensuring full and equal access to medical care. However, the court also said the doctors could testify at a trial that their religious beliefs barred them from doing the procedure for reasons other than the patient’s sexual orientation.

Kenneth R. Pedroza, the lawyer who repped the doctors, said the ruling would probably cause many physicians to refuse to perform inseminations at all. Pedroza said Brody did not violate the law because it did not bar discrimination on the basis of marital status when Benitez sought insemination in 1999. The state law has since been amended.

The Supreme Court’s ruling sends the case back to the San Diego County Superior Court for trial.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 19, 2008 (boomark / email).