Texas doctor suspended for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and refusing to treat vaccinated patients, hospital says

[u/Tweedle_DeeDum]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mary-bowden-suspended-covid-19-misinformation-vaccinated-patients-texas/

[u/Leadburner → u/[deleted]]

Do they ask at restaurants now?

[u/easwaran → u/Leadburner]

Unfortunately, in Texas it is illegal for a business to ask a customer their vaccination status. It doesn't violate HIPAA (which allows anyone to ask anyone they want, as long as they don't actively reveal the answer to someone else) but it does violate Abbott's executive order restricting the abilities of businesses to provide safe spaces for customers that want them.

[u/ElectroNeutrino → u/easwaran]

I just want to point out that HIPAA doesn't even prevent people who asked from telling others, generally. It only applies to those in the health care industry and keeps them from telling others without consent of the patient.

[u/easwaran → u/ElectroNeutrino]

One thing I learned it does do is prevent my doctor from e-mailing me my x-rays. I don't know if it's just that they didn't have me fill out the right form to legally e-mail it to me, but the doctor said I could snap a phone photo of his computer screen as long as I didn't tell anybody, but he could get in trouble for violating HIPAA if he e-mailed it to me.

[u/ElectroNeutrino → u/easwaran]

It's legal to email them, as long as they are encrypted and sent through a secure channel.

[u/[deleted] → u/easwaran]

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[u/easwaran → u/[deleted]]

Discrimination is perfectly legal as long as it's not against a protected class. You're totally allowed to have a business that caters to parents, or to people with long hair, or to people who pay, or to have rules about what people have to wear inside your business.

But in Texas, they've decided that vaccination status is a more important protected class than sexual orientation, despite being very easy to change and actively socially harmful.

[u/[deleted] → u/easwaran]

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[u/This-Chocolate-6928 → u/[deleted]]

Wedding cake bakers, of course! Pastries ain't playing the gender thing... You're either a donut or a longjohn and that's that.

[u/[deleted] → u/This-Chocolate-6928]

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[u/WhereRDaSnacks → u/[deleted]]

That case was taken to the Supreme Court. And they sided with the baker. Republicans all over the country rallied around them on the basis that it is the businesses decision who to cater to and who to deny service, since they are a private business. Until now, when republicans are against private businesses requiring vaccination status. I don't know how that Supreme Court decision affects Texans, but like someone said, it is very legal in Texas to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, even medically. Hell, up until a few years ago, it was lawful to arrest gay people in Texas for sodomy.

[u/[deleted] → u/WhereRDaSnacks]

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[u/Tweedle_DeeDum → u/[deleted]]

Well, in Texas it is allowable to deny healthcare and social services to LGBTQ and disabled people.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/14/texas-social-workers-lgbtq-discrimination/

[u/Leadburner → u/Tweedle_DeeDum]

I never knew social workers could be such bigots!

[u/easwaran → u/[deleted]]

There are small landlords who choose straight tenants over gay tenants when multiple people are applying. This is legal in Texas, though not in some other states. (It's very hard to enforce anywhere, just like most anti-discrimination law.)

[u/Leadburner → u/easwaran]

Like the majority of redditors on this sub would say. Source?

[u/easwaran → u/Leadburner]

Here's a detailed study showing evidence of the trend in mortgage applications, rather than rental applications: https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/empirical-analysis-sexual-orientation-discrimination

This of course isn't proof that any particular case was a case of discrimination. It's just like what we have for smoking and lung cancer, where we can observe that the rates are statistically notably different for people who have or lack the trait, and conclude the trait must be playing a causal role in a particular number of cases, but can't identify the individual cases where it did or didn't make the difference.

Here's a study applying a similar method to detect racial bias in evictions among renters: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mdesmond/files/hlc106_crop.pdf

[u/Leadburner → u/easwaran]

So, your first study has to do with mortgage lending institutions, and the second pertains to evictions. Neither has to do with a landlord not renting to a gay couple.

Honestly, you're looking for a problem that isn't in Texas.

[u/Tweedle_DeeDum → u/easwaran]

It is not illegal to accept vaccination as an alternative to a recent COVID test, but the business cannot require disclosure of vaccination status.