Category: United States

Navy nurse refuses to force-feed Guantánamo captive

Detainee’s lawyer says her client described the Navy medical officer’s refusal as an act of conscientious objection.

Miami Herald

Carol Rosenberg

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

“There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty. . . [Full Text]

One Conscientious Objector at Gitmo Is Great – But It’s Not Enough

Vice News

Natasha Lennard

The international medical community has long maintained an ethical line against force-feeding. As infectious disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz has written, “Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients… The procedure is, in a word, barbaric.”

Yet in Guantanamo Bay, it is daily procedure for a reported 18 hunger striking detainees. Every day medical professionals watch strapped-down inmates gasp, gag, and choke with streaming eyes as rubber tubes are snaked through sensitive nasal passages into empty stomachs. Despite urging from institutions including the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, Gitmo prison medical staff continue to participate, all of them just following orders. All but one. [Full text]

Hobby Lobby Case and What It Says About Corporations With a Conscience

 If people want to deny corporations a conscience, how can they ever again demand that corporations act morally, conscientiously?

Paul De Vries*

The Supreme Court was right to allow corporations to be exempt from the mandate to pay for abortion pills or contraception when their leaders have established religious reasons against them. Moral issues can stand as questions for the liberty of conscience – whether individual conscience or corporate conscience.

That liberty of conscience empowers individuals, religious institutions, and corporations – as the Supreme Court just now made clear on the last day of June! The protections of the liberty of conscience for years have allowed people with a track record of pacifism to be exempt from military service and also for hospital nurses and doctors who object to abortion to be scheduled for other surgeries only. “Conscientious objectors” have had a long, distinguished, respected, empowered history in America.

Oddly, those who attack a corporate right to choose allege that it is obvious that corporations do not have consciences – and so that they cannot be “conscientious objectors.” How are those attackers so blind?  [Full text]

CMA doctors hail Supreme Court mandate ruling, decry ongoing targeting of faith community

News release

Christian Medical Association

Washington, DC – June 30, 2014 – The 15,000-member Christian Medical Association (CMA, www.cmda.org), the nation’s largest and oldest faith-based doctors’ organization, today praised the Supreme Court’s ruling in two Health and Human Services (HHS) Obamacare mandate cases but noted “increasing attempts by the government to coerce the faith community.” CMA had outlined the medical aspects underlying religious objections to the HHS Obamacare mandate in its friend of the court brief in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius.

CMA CEO Dr. David Stevens said in a statement, “We are very thankful that the Supreme Court acted to protect family businesses from government coercion and fines for simply honoring the tenets of their faith.

“This is a much-needed victory for faith freedoms, because this administration continues its assault on the values of the faith community. We are witnessing increasing attempts by the government to coerce the faith community to adopt the government’s viewpoint in matters of conscience,” noted Stevens.

CMA also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in another Supreme Court case this term, McCullen v. Coakley, to defend First Amendment free speech and assembly rights of pro-life advocates against a Massachusetts law that prohibited many citizens from entering a public street or sidewalk within 35 feet of an abortion facility.

“There seems to be growing intolerance of the faith community by some government officials who appear to want to extinguish the First Amendment freedoms that allow for a diversity of values,” Stevens observed, “We are seeing this antagonism expressed in coercive government mandates enforced with harsh penalties and discriminatory practices that threaten to eliminate the faith community from the public square.”

Dr. Stevens noted that the Obama administration recently launched another sweeping mandate that appears to target faith-based groups, requiring agreement with same-sex marriage as a condition of receiving federal grants. CMA’s Freedom2Care website (www.Freedom2Care.org) details other violations of faith and conscience rights:

ACLJ: Supreme Court Issues “Landmark Decision Protecting Religious Freedom and Freedom of Conscience”

News release

American Center for Law and Justice

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a pro-life legal organization that focuses on constitutional law, said today the Supreme Court issued a “landmark decision protecting religious freedom and freedom of conscience” in a 5-4 decision striking down the constitutionality of the ObamaCare HHS mandate, ruling that closely-held corporations cannot be required to provide contraception coverage for their employees.

“This is a landmark decision protecting religious freedom and freedom of conscience,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ. “The court clearly recognized that closely-held corporations enjoy religious liberty rights just as they enjoy rights to free speech. American citizens do not lose their religious freedom when they form a corporation and try to live out their religious values in the conduct of their business. Moreover, the court – by holding that closely-held corporations cannot be forced to directly subsidize abortion-pills – dealt a severe blow to the Obama Administration’s ongoing assault on religious liberty and represents a significant setback to the abortion industry.”

The ACLJ filed an amicus brief urging the high court to reject the ObamaCare HHS mandate arguing that the mandate not only imposes “a very real and palpable injury” to those business owners affected but “substantially burdens their religious exercise” as well.

The ACLJ currently represents 32 individuals and corporations in seven pending actions against the government, including two cases currently pending before the high court. The ACLJ has obtained preliminary injunctive relief for its clients in all seven cases. Further, the ACLJ has represented 79 Members of Congress, filed more than a dozen amicus briefs, and stood up for hundreds of thousands who oppose the mandate.

Led by ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow, the ACLJ is based in Washington, D.C. and is online at www.aclj.org.

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