Homobigotry is what’s up, doc.

To be filed under Keep Your Opinions to Yourself, and cross-filed under Shove It Up Your Ass:

A 36-year-old lesbian has filed a state complaint against a doctor and physician's assistant alleging she was given literature condemning homosexuality as "sinful and sexually impure" after a routine appointment.

Jamie Beiler, formerly of Kissimmee, saw physician's assistant Dawn Pope-Wright on March 11, 2005, for a bronchitis checkup because her normal doctor was on vacation, according to a Jan. 27 complaint filed with the Division of Medical Quality Assurance.

Beiler's sexuality was noted in her medical file, but unmentioned during the appointment, her lawyers said.

When she opened up an envelope Pope-Wright left at the checkout counter, she was shocked to find photocopied pages including Bible verses that denounced homosexuality and asserted God can help her change.

You can see the materials given to Beiler here, courtesy of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Pam, who gets the hat tip for this one, says, “Some licenses need to be revoked in this case. There's nothing else to it.” Absolutely.

Pharmacists who refuse to dispense certain drugs to women, teachers who refuse to hang up LGBT tolerance posters in their classrooms, doctors who want to right to refuse to treat gay patients, a physician’s assistant who hands out condemning literature to a lesbian patient…all in the name of Christianity. They use their religion as a weapon and a shield, and worse yet as a trump card to jusitfy any and all manner of exclusion, judgment, and oppression, and the rest of us are expected to respect it.

Fuck that.

I don't give a good goddamn why someone believes in inequality, or what their rationale is. Telling me "I’m a Christian and my god says so" will evoke precisely the same amount of respect for such a position as "A flying bear told me gays are bad during a gnarly peyote trip." In other words, NONE.

And that's not because I hate Christians; it's because I'm literate. I've read the Bible; Jesus Christ (you know, the guy after which the religion is named) doesn't say anything that makes that position tenable. It’s pretty evident that acting as God’s earthly dispensers of judgment and reprimand is not explicitly endorsed; in fact, the opposite is quite plainly true. And you don’t have to be a Christian to suss that out from the Bible.

I know that it’s frowned upon to evaluate one strand of Christianity as “wrong,” because there are almost as many Biblical interpretations as there are Bible-readers, but where, exactly, are we allowed to draw the line at what we will acknowledge as acceptable behavior with religious validation? At some point, it’s going to have to be fair game in America to tell people who say they’re Christians but don’t follow a remotely Christian doctrine that they’re full of shit, because accommodating ignorance and the misappropriation of religion to justify being an asshole doesn’t do anything but encourage assholism.

I’m well and bloody tired of being expected to extend logically-incoherent exceptions to people because they call themselves Christians that I wouldn’t extend to anyone else.