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Scientology Group Urged Veto of Mental Health Bill

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: July 17th, 2015, 6:00am UTC

An anonymous reader writes: According to records obtained by The Texas Tribune, Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed a bill that would have given doctors more power to detain mentally ill and potentially dangerous patients, after a Church of Scientology-backed group helped organize a campaign against it. "Medical staff should work closely with law enforcement to help protect mentally ill patients and the public," he said. "But just as law enforcement should not be asked to practice medicine, medical staff should not be asked to engage in law enforcement, especially when that means depriving a person of the liberty protected by the Constitution." The bill would have allowed doctors to put mentally ill patients on a four-hour hold if they were suspected of being a danger to themselves or others. The bill had the support of two of the nation's largest medical associations.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=+Scientology+Group+Urged+Veto+of+Mental+Health+Bill%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1JmmgaU"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpolitics.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F07%2F17%2F0259211%2Fscientology-group-urged-veto-of-mental-health-bill%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/07/17/0259211/scientology-group-urged-veto-of-mental-health-bill?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/07/17/0259211/scientology-group-urged-veto-of-mental-health-bill?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/9o3fEDcC2Nk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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