Docs versus Glocks | Homestead Security | Forums

Will be interesting to see if this spreads to other states, had a doctor ask me once if we had firearms, told him to go pound sand

Should the First Amendment protect what doctors can say to their patients in the privacy of the examining room? Weighing state prohibitions on gay conversion therapy, liberals have tended to think the state should be able to regulate medical treatment without worrying about free speech.

Now the shoe’s on the other foot: Florida’s ban on physicians asking patients about gun ownership puts liberals in the position of wanting to protect the doctor-patient relationship. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the Florida “docs vs. Glocks” law this week on the ground that the state’s interest in protecting gun ownership outweighs physicians’ free-speech interests -- a result sure to trouble liberals.

This decision is problematic in its application of free-speech law, as First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh points out. But what’s really wrong is our whole framework in using free speech to analyze communication between a medical professional and a patient.

That relationship should be evaluated through a distinct constitutional lens: the lens of privacy. And when doing the privacy analysis, we need to draw a clear line between the state’s compelling interest in regulating the practice of medicine on safety grounds and its far less important interest in shaping patient-physician interactions to comply with the government’s preferred social values.

more http://www.bloomberg.....ree-speech