Monday, October 19, 2009

The Evils of Bigotry

If you do much blog reading, you're probably seeing a lot of links to this post by Nicola Griffith about the horrible way Jackson Memorial Hospital of Miami, Florida treated the family of a dying woman.

It is absolutely reprehensible what these three evil people -- Jackson social worker Garnett Frederick and attending physicians Alois Zauner and Carlos Alberto Cruz, and, yes, I said evil and I mean it -- did to Janice Langbehn and her three children. (And I'm not looking all that kindly upon U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, who is at the very least criminally deficient in compassion.) They took a horrible situation and found ways to make it worse at every turn; people like that have no place in the so-called "caring professions" and I hope there's still a chance they can be professionally censured, if not given more serious punishment.

I don't want to live in an America where things like that happen. This needs to stop happening. Deliberately keeping people away from their dying loved ones is evil, and there can be no justification for it.

2 comments:

Nicola Griffith said...

Many thanks for linking. I hope your readers know that while empathy is all well and good, it's what makes us human, we also have to *act*: make the phone call, make a donation, make time to talk to someone about the issue. Make it happen. The time is now.

Anonymous said...

When I first heard about this story, I just assumed that the hospital staff would eventually be made responsible for their actions. Apparently I was putting far too much faith on the legal system and human compassion.

nicola is right - this kind of thing needs to stop, now.

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