Illinois state Sen. Sue Rezin told colleagues amid pushback against amending the Health Care Right of Conscience Act, "We've printed the opposition slips out here. This is what it looks like.” | Center Square
Illinois state Sen. Sue Rezin told colleagues amid pushback against amending the Health Care Right of Conscience Act, "We've printed the opposition slips out here. This is what it looks like.” | Center Square
Illinois state Senator Sue Rezin, (R-Morris), criticized Democrats who passed an amendment to the Health Care Right of Conscience Act (HCRCA) to clarify that enforcing measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are not violating the act, without considering thousands of people who voiced their opposition to the measure.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently signed Senate Bill 1169 into law, but Rezin is claiming that tens of thousands of Illinoisans who filed witness slips in opposition of the amendment weren’t heard.
“Over the course of this bill I would say for the last week we had a 7,000 people slip in opposition to amendment 1,” she said during the speech on the Senate floor. “We had over 54,000 slip in opposition of amendment 2, which is very similar to amendment 3 that we're discussing here today.”
Rezin noted in her speech that in the 24 hours prior, lawmakers had more than 22,000 people file witness slips in opposition to amendment.
“If you want to know what that looks like, we've printed the opposition slips out here,” she told her colleagues. “This is what it looks like.”
Moreover, Rezin maintained in her speech that the amendment received the most slips in opposition that she’d seen over the last decade. “There are concerns around the state that people are not being heard,” she said, “that their rights are being taken away from them.”
SB 1169 ensures that employers, businesses and other organizations can and must enforce measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and its variants. In a news release on his website, Pritzker claimed the amendment will ensure that vaccine requirements can continue amid the pandemic and that the HCRCA cannot be manipulated to create an unsafe working environment.
According to the assembly website, the amendment stipulates that by enforcing any measures an employer, business or organization is not violating the HCRCA, which was originally enacted to ensure that healthcare workers did not have to provide services that go against their religious beliefs.
The amendment was signed into law by the governor on Nov. 8.
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