08-18) 12:53 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- California doctors who have religious objections to gays and lesbians must nevertheless treat them the same as any other patient or find a colleague in the office who will do so, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday.
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The justices rejected a San Diego County fertility clinic's attempt to use its physicians' religious beliefs as a justification for their refusal to provide artificial insemination for a lesbian couple. The ruling, based on a state law prohibiting businesses from discriminating against customers because of their sexual orientation, comes three months after the court struck down California's ban on same-sex marriage.
"This isn't just a win for me personally and for other lesbian women," said the plaintiff, Guadalupe Benitez. "Anyone could be the next target if doctors are allowed to pick and choose their patients based on religious views about other groups of people."
The ruling is the first in the nation to address doctors' religious objections to treating gay or lesbian patients and should make health care more accessible, said Benitez's lawyer, Jennifer Pizer, of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Lawyers for the clinic and two of its doctors said they were considering an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. One supporter of the physicians called the ruling a strike against religious freedom.
"This court is allowing two lesbians to force these individuals to choose between being doctors in the state of California or being able to practice their faith," said attorney Brad Dacus of the conservative Pacific Justice Institute, which filed arguments backing the doctors.
Benitez, now 36, sued North Coast Women's Care in Vista (San Diego County) and two of its doctors, saying they told her in 2000 that their Christian beliefs prohibited them from performing intrauterine insemination for a lesbian. The doctors later said they would have refused the treatment for any unmarried couple.
They referred Benitez to another clinic for the insemination, which cost her thousands of dollars because it wasn't covered by her health plan, her lawyer said. She did not become pregnant then, but since has borne three children and is raising them with her partner of 18 years.
The lawsuit has been on hold while courts decided whether the doctors could defend denying treatment to lesbians by invoking their religious beliefs.
A state appeals court ruled in the doctors' favor in 2005. But the state's high court said Monday that California's Unruh Civil Rights Act - which prohibits discrimination against business customers because of their customers' sexual orientation as well as race, sex, religion and other categories - applies to all businesses, regardless of their religious views.
The law "furthers California's compelling interest in ensuring full and equal access to medical treatment irrespective of sexual orientation," said Justice Joyce Kennard.
In language that would apply equally to abortions, Kennard said doctors who have religious objections to a particular procedure or treatment can refuse to perform it for any patient, but can't selectively reject gays and lesbians. She said they also have the option of referring a patient to someone else at the clinic who will perform the procedure, an option that wasn't available in this case.
Kennard cited the court's 2004 ruling requiring Catholic Charities to abide by a state law that compels company-sponsored health plans for employees to offer contraception for women. She also rejected the doctors' free-speech claim, saying they remain free to criticize the anti-discrimination law as long as they comply with it.
Kenneth Pedroza, lawyer for the doctors and the clinic, noted that the ruling leaves the physicians free to argue to the jury that they had religious objections to providing the infertility treatment to unmarried couples. The Unruh Act now bans discrimination based on marital status, but the rights of unmarried couples were not clearly established when Benitez visited the clinic.
"Our doctors aren't going to be silenced," Pedroza said.
In considering a U.S. Supreme Court appeal, Pedroza said the high court may be ready to reconsider its 1990 ruling that upheld states' authority to enforce laws that restrict religious practices even though they were not intended to stifle religion. That ruling, cited in Monday's California decision, allowed Oregon to deny unemployment benefits to two people who were fired for using peyote in a religious ritual at an American Indian church.
