Friday, November 8, 2013

Once More, With Feeling

So apparently, law enforcement in the Southwest has taken to doing this on a regular basis:

Customs/Border Patrol Doing Anal/Vaginal Probes Without Warrants

Look, I'm over here by the Pacific Ocean. Maybe the Constitution is different for us here.

But evidently, in what is now the third such story in three days, law enforcement (in this case actual federal agents) took a woman from the border to a local hospital presumably to have licensed medical professionals go poking all up in her stuff.

I'm not a Constitutional scholar, but I have a not too startling suspicion that if the police aren't entitled to just stick their hands up into my body cavities anyways, any such explorations are neither actually "reasonable", nor what anyone with an IQ north of their shoe size would call so. Let alone how any judge not certifiably insane would see it.

So for anyone from say, Texas or New Mexico...WTF?

Someone with a badge comes in and asks you politely to please go poking around in Mr. Jones or Ms. Sanchez in ways you wouldn't consider without a 27-page pre-op form under normal circumstances, and yet in these cases we have doctors (and possibly assisted by nurses etc.) falling all over themselves to violate policy, procedure, standards of care, professional ethics, and state and federal law with the studied casualness of retarded sociopathic serial abusers, raised on lead paint chips and high on crack.

I repeat for emphasis:  
WTF?!?!?

I've searched diligently to find the story where law enforcement officials held medical staff at gunpoint and demanded the procedures be done, but so far that search is in vain.

Now look, I like police officers, as a rule, knowing their job is just as nasty and a wee bit more dangerous than ours, with similar clienteles. I joke with them, work with them, hell, I've even been related to them both by blood and by marriage, and I know there's both good ones and bad ones.

But these abuses aren't taking place on roadsides at 2AM with no one around or watching.

They're happening, serially, in accredited medical facilities, and performed by professional, theoretically conscientious, and undoubtedly licensed and usually board-certified medical staff. WHO SHOULD EFFING KNOW BETTER, and not to put too fine a point on it, with an average IQ advantage over the minions of law enforcement of 20-30 points most days, and an additional 4-10 years of post-secondary education.

In places that are supposed to be bastions of dignity, caring, and scrupulous professionalism, rather than modern re-creations of Dr. Mengele's konzentrationslaager infirmary.

So yet again, I repeat: if you're in any way involved in the profession of medical practice, and have participated in this, please, for the good of humanity, burn down your hospital, and then go home and kill yourself, or at the minimum, go down to the local state attorney general's office and turn state's evidence, followed by giving a full and complete public allocution of your and your colleague's crimes on live TV.

And then apologize, as you contemplate living the rest of your life as a traitor to the profession, and a pariah among decent human beings. Because we really need people like you in this profession, and probably walking the planet, like we need a dose of the clap.

And consider yourselves lucky that we don't let villagers come with torches and pitchforks and take you one and all to a well-deserved stake cookout in your honor.

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