A Walgreens employee refused to sell a married woman a box of condoms,
citing his religious beliefs in denying the sale.
Now, Jessica Pence and her husband Nate decided to vacation in Wisconsin for
the fourth of July weekend.
I guess that was mistake number one.
But nonetheless, there in Wisconsin,
it's a married couple, she forgot to pack some condoms.
Okay, it's vacation time, a little loving, you don't wanna get pregnant,
totally get it.
But she deals with this unsavory Walgreens employees.
She'd forgotten her oral contraceptives back home in Minneapolis, so
they pulled up to a drug store in Hayward and
she headed inside to pick up a box of condoms and some other items.
I can't sell those to you.
She remembers the clerk named John telling her as she stepped up to
the register with her purchases.
So she was confused.
She's like register broken like what's going on?
Confused, she gestured to the aisle where she picked up the box.
Maybe John thought she carried in merchandise from another retailer
into the Walgreens?
That would have made more sense than his actual explanation.
Quote, well, we can sell that to you, he clarified.
But I will not because of my faith.
I told him that's none of your business.
He said, well, I'm sorry, this is what my faith demands.
And she responded, I think accurately by saying, you're not sorry,
she remembers telling him as the line of customers backed up behind her.
Now, eventually a manager was called.
And the manager, like this blows my mind.
The manager comes, the cashier,
John who's refusing to sell the box of condoms to a married
woman demands that he gets logged out of the register.
So he's not in any way even digitally connected to the sale of the condoms.
Manager does it, sells, is able to do the transaction.
The woman is able to get the condoms.
But it is outrageous because if you don't want to see blood,
maybe don't be a surgeon.
If you don't wanna do your, if your faith is somehow getting in the way
of you being able to do your job, then maybe you should consider another job.
That goes for the pharmacists who moralize about birth control and
refuse to dispense birth control to women who have a prescription for it.
You don't want, if your faith makes your job impossible to do, do another job.
Go be a priest somewhere.
Go be a nun somewhere.
Go do missionary work.
I don't know.
I don't even care.
But if your job is to be a cashier at a Walgreens,
you don't get to pick and choose what transactions you will carry out.
This is a married woman who's just trying to buy a box of condoms.
Which by the way, let's just address what condoms are used for.
Yes, it is a preventative measure, if you are trying to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
That's definitely one of its uses.
It's also used to stop the spread of diseases.
So I don't know what John's religion is exactly, but
he believes in a religion that's pro disease.
Step down, resign.
This is not the job for you.
What's even more infuriating though is that Walgreens decided to release
a statement backing up their employee.
Like these companies never back up their employees, ever.
They'll throw their employees under the bus for anything.
They don't wanna pay their employees a decent wage.
They don't wanna take care of their employees with decent benefits, but
this is when they step in like no, we're looking out for our employee.
Our employee who refuses to do his job because his alleged religion
prevents him from being able to sell condoms to a married woman.
Okay, so they released a statement saying, quote,
our company policy allows team members to step away from completing a transaction to
which they have a moral objection and refer the transaction to a fellow team
member or manager who will complete the customer's request.
But what happens if a store is packed?
There's no one else available to carry out the transaction?
If there is a core element of that person's job,
that the individuals unable to carry out because of their faith,
how does it make sense for that person to be employed doing that work?
Now, I think this is very different from, let's say, I remember there was a story
years ago, a case involving an employee at Abercrombie and Fitch.
A woman who wears a headdress worked there.
And Abercrombie and Fitch had some sort of, not a uniform, but
they had a dress code and they demanded that she take her headdress off.
Now, this woman wearing a headdress doesn't prevent her from doing her job.
She's just wearing an item on her head that they don't like.
But that doesn't in any way stop her or
prevent her from doing the job she was hired to do.
That actually made its way through the courts, the court sided with her.
She was able to continue wearing the headdress.
But in this particular case or in the case of a pharmacy,
refusing to dispense birth control to someone who has a prescription for
it, they are refusing to do a core part of their job.
So don't do that job.
Resign, find something else.
And guess what?
This isn't the only incident,
there was a recent video posted by a TikToker by the name of Abigail Martin.
And she had a very similar experience at a Walgreens,
not with condoms in this case, with oral birth control.
Let's hear what happened.
>> I don't wanna be biased against any religion, but
the lady that was helping me was older.
She was one of the only people working there, they weren't busy.
And she had two crosses, not one, but two crosses hanging around her neck.
And when I told her what I was there for my birth control,
she looks me up and down and goes like excuse me.
She then says yeah we're not going to refill that prescription,
you need to call your provider.
And I said you won't refill it or you can't refill it.
And she goes you just need to call your provider.
So that's what I do.
Then I get a message saying that it's delayed now.
That I can get it, but now it's delayed.
And then I get a message saying it's out of stock, what is it?
So I call them Walgreens again.
The amazing lady who helped me this time was great.
She said I don't know why we haven't refilled this for you.
You have former refills left and your provider called approving it.
I'm gonna refill this for you.
But would you mind asking or would you mind telling me who helped you last time?
I was intrigued.
So I told her and I said could I ask why.
She goes I know exactly who you're talking about and
we've been having this problem for the last two weeks.
They've been having a problem with women not being able to get their birth control
for the last two weeks.
>> Yeah, that Walgreens employees should be fired.
I also think it's problematic that these major corporations like Walgreens and
CBS are starting to become the only pharmacies you can go to,
to get your prescription drugs.
A lot of these smaller pharmacies are just being destroyed by this,
the monopolistic nature of these big chains like Walgreens and CBS.
So there's no easy solution.
If we start dealing with this prevalence of Walmart, not Walmart,
Walgreens employees or even Walmart, they have pharmacies as well.
Like basically saying no, I'm not gonna do my job.
I'm gonna stand in between you and the health care you need.
I'm gonna stand between you and the medicine, the drugs,
whatever it is that you need, because religion.
Let me tell you something about religion, okay?
You should be able to practice your religion, but
your religion should not cause harm onto others.
That's the rule.
You wanna believe whatever you wanna believe, right?
You're a person of faith, awesome.
Religious liberty is important because faith is a huge part of a lot of
people's lives.
But if you believe in a particular religious doctrine, go ahead and
follow that religious doctrine, everything that it entails.
Do it.
More power to you.
But what frustrates me beyond belief is that everyone else has to be
either demonized, victimized, brutalized, whatever it is,
based on whatever religious belief an individual has.
My faith prevents me from just being a decent human being and
selling you a box of condoms as a married woman.
By the way, who knows what she needs a box of condoms for, right?
Maybe she's trying to prevent pregnancy.
Maybe her husband has some sort of illness or something.
I don't know.
But it's none of his business.
If you can't do your job because your religious beliefs prevent you
from doing your job, you should be fired, you need to find another line of work.
Step down, resign, it's over.
But we don't live in that world.
We now live in a world where you have all of these zealots who are emboldened
by what the Supreme Court has done in reversing roe.
It's not just about the reversal of Roe.
It's about Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion where he of course,
agrees with the reversal of Roe.
I mean, come on, why not?
Okay, but he felt the need to write a separate opinion to
target previous Supreme Court rulings that actually valued
the privacy that married couples have in their sex lives.
Cuz he's a creep.
These people are creeps.
As Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority in erasing
abortion rights for half the country, he revisited his shopping list of other
demonstrably erroneous precedents the court could tackle next.
He included the 1965 Griswold v Connecticut ruling that guaranteed married
couples the right to privacy in their bedrooms.
Because no, including the right to buy contraception.
That was what the case was about.
But no, we can't have that, Clarence Thomas wants to know
whether you and your partner are having protected sex.
You can't be having protected sex.
Clarence Thomas won't have it.
Clarence Thomas sitting there in the Supreme Court thinking
about whether or not people are engaging in oral or anal sex.
Like the disgusting creep that he is Mr. pubic hair on a coke can disgusting.
These people are perverts.
It is none of their business.
Again, you're a person of faith, you have a problem with condoms have at it.
Do whatever you wanna do.
You don't get to dictate whether or not other people should have access to
birth control, should have access to condoms.
Whether or not they use condoms whether or not they engage in oral sex, whether or
not they engage in sodomy, it doesn't matter.
It's none of your business.
I mean it's hilarious that we pretend like we support and value liberty in this
country when we have the most powerful people in government, including within
our judicial system talking about banning certain sexual acts in the bedroom.
Again, none of your business and why are you thinking about this?
This country is a disgrace.
It's a disgrace because the left has sat by and
I'm talking about elected lawmakers.
They have just taken all of our freedoms for granted,
things that people had fought for aggressively and had accomplished.
We all took it for granted we just did.
And over the last 50 years we've had religious zealots, doing whatever
it took to chip away, chip away at our liberties, chip away at our freedoms,
chip away at our privacy, triple chip away at our civil liberties.
And here we are.
This is the culmination of that 50 year, one sided battle.
And I say one sided because one side sat by and thought, no, everything's great.
Everything's gonna just keep moving toward progress.
It didn't.
Because whether we like it or
not, we have people in this country who don't love our constitution.
They don't love freedom.
They don't love the separation of church and state.
They want to control everything you do in your personal life.
That is what the abortion debate is about.
It's always been about that.
And that's what this is about a weird power hungry boy named John who wants to
tell a married woman that she can't use a condom when she has sex with her husband.
It's disgusting.
I'm not having it.
We need to fight back aggressively against this garbage.
And the fact that Walgreens stood up for that.
What about your other employees?
I hope you stand up for them when they decide they don't want to do their jobs,
but they won't, I'm sure if they turn down a mandatory shift or,
or some sort of, a mandatory overtime shift.
If they turn that down, I'm sure they'll get fired for that.
It's unbelievable