I guess I see things differently because of job issues that I've encountered.
I'm a straight man, and--while I was a paramedic field training officer--I was assigned to work with a Canadian exchange student who was a paramedic and an RN, and studying to be a nurse practitioner.
I was considered to be an excellent paramedic by the standards of my time, but this guy that was assigned to me was better. A whole lot better. I actually learned more from him than he learned from me.
My point is that we ran on a sick kid, and I instructed my student to manage the call for several reasons. The biggest reason was that my intuition was telling me that I was missing something, and another reason is that sick kids have a tendency to "crash" (ie: deteriorate) very quickly.
The problem is that the kid's parents were very devout Southern Baptists, and had problems with the perceived effeminate mannerisms of my student. There was a real power struggle that erupted between myself and the parents, as I wanted the kid to have every edge for the purpose of keeping him alive, and the parents were worried that the brief exposure to a homosexual man would "turn their kid gay" since God doesn't make mistakes.
So, they would sue the ambulance company for me "endangering" their kid by exposing their sick child to a "homosexual child molester" and "homosexualist influences", and that I had no sense of ethics.
And so on.
I promise that I wasn't assigning my student to manage the call just to make the parents uncomfortable. My student had much more experience in pediatrics than I did, had worked in a pediatric intensive care unit for 6 years, and--as I indicated earlier--I had a strong sense that I was missing something important (which turned out to be true later).
I was actually excoriated because I was told that if the kid died, it wouldn't be any different than a Jehova's Witness's kid who may die from the parents refusing a blood transfusion . . . but at the same time, a paramedic is taught to be practical, and not overly concerned with theory in a crisis. We are expected to use any and all resources available to us to keep someone alive until they reach the hospital.
I saved the kid by assigning my student to manage the situation, but in their minds, I should have let the kid die because because my student is gay.
I have problems dealing with these kinds of conflicts, but perhaps this is because of my autism.
I will be very happy if this recent court ruling may keep stupid conflicts like this from occurring, if only for the sake of giving some leverage to healthcare workers who are trying to save peoples' lives in an emergency.
