Monday May 22, 2017 - Texas Anti-LGBTQ laws are very bad for our community

A variety of anti-LGBTQ bills, continue to move thru the Texas legislature and toward the Governor's desk.

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Below is a highlights (lowlights):

1. Allow medical professionals to deny care to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people and emergency contraception for rape survivors.

2. Allow pharmacists to deny birth control to women and hormone therapy to trans people.

3. Allow state-funded adoption and foster care agencies to turn away applicants on religious grounds, denying parents who are LGBT, or even those who are Jewish, Muslim or atheist.

4. An amendment added at the last minute to a nursing care bill, HB 2950, would bar the Texas Board of Nursing from punishing discriminatory actions if they are committed in the service of a nurse’s “religious beliefs” ... a nurse could “cite his religious beliefs as a reason to refuse to care for a gay patient on the grounds that he believes homosexuality is a sin” or is against his faith. “A nurse who believes that men are the head of the household,” the group also notes, “could breach client confidentiality to disclose a woman’s medical condition to her husband against her wishes.”

5. Pharmacists could opt-out of the practices that are standard based on personal religious convictions. A pharmacist could decide not to fill a prescription for hormone therapy for a transgender customer ... Or a “pharmacist could use religion as a justification to refuse to serve African-American customers because they believes the Bible mandates the segregation of the races.”

6.  Two bills that would regulate legal services, SB 302 and SB 303, now have amendments which allow for religious refusal by state-licensed attorneys ... an attorney could deny his or her duty to inform a client about his or her rights in a divorce proceeding, for example, even trying to talk the client out of getting a divorce, all based on the attorney’s religious objection to divorce.

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Of the six issues above, three of them (#1, #2 and #5) can affect HRT directly. It may not affect people in the major cities, but its the smaller cities where pharmacy options are limited.

These laws are creating a "Jim Crow" type system against our community. I think today's growing virtual economy will help off set this discriminating system. But its ridiculous that they we will have to deal with this.