BrianGarst.com

The title is, quite obviously, rhetorical.  I know what happened to property rights.  FDR and the Progressives wrote them right out of the constitution without the need for so much as a single amendment.  Decisions like this just always drive home the loss:

Pharmacists are obliged to dispense the Plan B pill, even if they are personally opposed to the “morning after” contraceptive on religious grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In a case that could affect policy across the western U.S., a supermarket pharmacy owner in Olympia, Wash., failed in a bid to block 2007 regulations that required all Washington pharmacies to stock and dispense the pills.

Family-owned Ralph’s Thriftway and two pharmacists employed elsewhere sued Washington state officials over the requirement. The plaintiffs asserted that their Christian beliefs prevented them from dispensing the pills, which can prevent implantation of a recently fertilized egg. They said that the new regulations would force them to choose between keeping their jobs and heeding their religious objections to a medication they regard as a form of abortion.

…Although the courts have yet to pronounce judgment on other aspects of the lawsuit, the unanimous ruling on the free-exercise clause could portend further judgments, as the case moves forward, that a patient’s right to timely medication supersedes a pharmacist’s personal convictions.

Of course someone shouldn’t be forced to sell something in their store that they find violates their religious beliefs.  That, however, misses the point.  They shouldn’t have to sell something in their store that they don’t want to sell, no matter the reason.  That liberty is a simple extension of one of our most fundamental human and natural rights: the right to dispose of our property (which includes our bodies, among other things) as we see fit.

There is, on the other hand, no individual right to walk into any given store (pharmacy) and find a specific product (Plan B pill).  Nor is there any right to “timely medication,” whatever that means.  “Rights” such as those, which place positive burdens on others, are not rights at all.

civil liberties constitution