Okay, okay, okay.
I think we are discussing two separate issues here. Namely:
- Did the father have the right to request race-based accommodation based on his beliefs?
- Did the hospital have the obligation to accommodation the race-driven request?
1. Request for Race-Based Accommodation
Whether we agree with it or not, my view is that, more likely than not, the father had the right—at the very least—to verbalise this request to the hospital. I base this understanding on my reading of the
First Amendment to the Constitution. Now, I should be clear here in that I consider the right of someone to make a request, and the obligation of an establishment to honour it or abide by it, to be two distinct concepts; the right to make a request does not necessarily translate into a right to
have it. The father, nevertheless, had the right to make known his preference.
Now, moving onto a bit more abstract level than the First Amendmenet, this is also not to say that the right to state his beliefs does not mean that he has a right to be precluded from any social or business consequences associated with his request. He would have no right in my view, for example, to not then be asked to leave, nor would he have the right to demand service after having made his request, unless it was a service to which he was consitutionally guaranteed.
2. Obligation to Accommodate Request
This, in my view, is entirely at the discretion of the hospital. They had a few options here, and in my own personal opinion, they did not select the correct one. In this case, the hospital chose to agree to the father's request, and in doing so, they broke employment laws in the state by assigning work on the basis of race—there can be no legitimate argument against this. Employment laws were broken, plain and simple, and the nurse is likely to be successful in her suit.
Other than to accede to the father's request and assign work on the basis of race, the hospital also could have elected to (b) refuse the father's request and continue treatment and care in the way that they deemed to be lawful and appropriate, unless and until the father expressly withdraws consent, and then cease all treatment and care; or (
c) assume that there was no consent for continued treatment or care, due to an inability to meet the father's conditions of consent, and to cease all treatment and care.
In both of these cases, it would be the right of the father to withdraw consent (or to place conditions on consent) for treatment and care—as distasteful as it would have been—on whatever basis he might choose. There does not exist, however, an obligation on the part of the hospital to make accommodations based on that request. They can continue to provide care and treatment insofar as they are able; and when they are unable to do so under his conditions, then consent no longer exists and he is free to take his family elsewhere for care.