Monday, April 10, 2006

Target Practice

I may have to retract all the loving, red things I gushed about in my previous post about Target. I went to Bangor yesterday and picked up a few things at Borders, including BUST magazine. I then went Target, blah, blah blah. I sat in the parking lot while L went into Home Dump and read BUST while I waited. Wendy McClure has a great column in there about pop culture-y type stuff, and this month's article was appropos with a target symbom and the heading "Target Practice: If loving this chain is wrong, do we want to be right?" I read on, because I love Target and I do love to be right, just not to the Right. And boy, the religios have not only tainted my favorite store with their exclusive beliefs, but they continue to step on my reproductive rights too. I calculated that I have spent nearly half my life on birth control, which has afforded me the right to live a life that I wanted, until I am ready to have kids. And it's always being threatened. I digress. McClure's article descibes how Target's brass decided in October that their pharmacists have a right to not fill morning after pill prescriptions if it offends their religious beliefs. They can pass the prescription on to another pharmacist, or another pharmacy. It happened in Missouri. She goes on to compare Target with Tom Cruise. God, we must be kindred spirits! Ultimately she suggests that we ban the store, not to somehow affect its consumer prowess, but for our own peace of mind.

Wendy McClure has a blog, a pretty famous blog. She ended up writing a book based on material from that blog. I feel as if she would be a the kind pf person I would be friends with, if I lived in Chicago, or she in Maine.

My feelings on religion are varied. It's like nutmeg, a little bit goes a long way and too much just ruins the dish. My playful term religios (for which we have a lot in Maine), describes the following people: They have crosses they cover in lights and light up on their lawns, along with placards with bible quotes on them, they have stickers saying "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" on their cars, they protest lingerie shops with live models, and so on into exhaustion. Religios bother me. They are extroverted believers, while I prefer my spiritual, introverted faith. After I experienced a catastrophic loss nearly 2 years ago, I felt life was godless, and faith unimportant. I hated Sundays, for being quiet, and empty. My parents urged me to go to church with them, but since my childhood church going days my parents have moved toward the Quaker church and I didn't feel as if I would find a lot of peace in silence. My first many Sundays alone, I watched the first 2 series of Homicide: Life on the Streets and the entire series of Band of Brothers. I was at the temple of TV, which was really mindless but exactly what I needed. Then I started going to a UU church, and I really started to grieve. And I started to get better.

When my mother's best friend died over 25 years ago, the local Baptist minister came to my house to see her. He told my mom that unless she was saved, she would never see her friend again. People say dumb things when others experience loss. And we do strange things to try to deal with and ultimately get over the loss, like going to Target, watching concentrated amounts of TV, reading lots of books, seeing friends, and gathering. Could I give up Target? Yes. Could I give up on society, with its religious fanatics? Yes, even more so.

2 comments:

CBK said...

To me, having an open policy like that, leaving it to the discretion of an individual pharmacist, is better than making a company or store-wide policy.

But I'm a guy. My level of outrage is understandably much lower.

Anonymous said...

I don't think folks should be forced to fill prescriptions--but those pharmacists ought to be screened and the store ensure there's at least somebody on duty to fill the prescription.

Glad to see another UUer. We're few and far between here in Texas--especially those of us under the age of 70.