Morning After Pill at Wal-Mart

As I've written before, the state of Massachusetts forcing Wal-Mart to carry the morning after pill in its pharmacies, is a horribly bad idea. Radley's Fox column this week references the controversy.

As I was reading "Small Giants" this weekend I had some thoughts on this Wal-Mart controversy. The author was describing one of the small giants as being a Christian company. The owners of the company were Christian and they had tried to find a balance of how much religiousness to allow in the company. Anyway they were trying to find an appropriate mix of values that would allow the employees of the company feel the most attached to the company. While I was getting my MBA in a Jesuit university, we had many discussions about being socially responsible in our companies and the importance of social responsibility and values within a company. Another example in the book is a case where the company was deciding whether or not to manufacture a hinge that would benefit tobacco companies (and many other companies) in some point-of-sale displays. All companies across the country have their own value systems in place and decide what to sell and who to sell to. Not all value systems are the same, therefore it is offensive for the government to install it's value system within the company.

For the sake of my argument, I'm not really concerned with whether or not the morning after pill is socially responsible, only that reasonable people can agree to how responsible it is. The government is not allowing the company to decide for itself what it sells or who it sells it to. I'm being real clunky about my point here, but, a company gets to decide what it's values are. If they don't want to sell a certain product and are forced to by the government, it weakens that companies adherence to their values. In companies, such as the ones in the book, that are socially responsible and integral parts of their community, weakening their culture/values is counterproductive. The government represses their values and they become like all the really large corporations that don't really have any values, except to continue growing. Repressing citizens' values is not really what the founders had in mind.