Brad McDowell has been a registered nurse for 16 years. In 2021, he began working at Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown, Maryland. In February, 2023 he was promoted to assistant clinical manager, having responsibility for other nurses.
Maryland has been implementing DEI policies in the medical profession for several years including the requirement that all healthcare professionals take implicit bias training courses. One course implied that white healthcare personnel were either negligently or carelessly providing inadequate healthcare to black women. Another DEI course asserted that the U.S. is built on “an ideology of White supremacy and justifies policies, and structures of subordination for groups of color through power and White privilege”.
Brad privately refused to continue the propagation of such lunacy. In February, 2024 Brad posted on his Facebook page, “No employer has the right to invade the unconscious spaces of its employees’ minds in an attempt to reprogram them into thinking certain ways. If your employer signs you up for an ‘Unconscious Bias’ aka ‘Implicit Bias Training’ then they are doing exactly that.” Brad’s Facebook page didn’t link him to Meritus or mention the hospital’s name.
The next day, Brad was placed on administrative leave. A few days later a document given to Brad stated that his Facebook post and other posts could be “reasonably viewed as offensive” or “were misleading or false”. Brad was then terminated from Meritus Medical Center.
You would think and hope that hospitals such as Meritus would focus on competence, quality care and service. But instead, they focus on DEI, politics and censorship. Meritus doesn’t believe people should have offensive, misleading or false views. The problem is Meritus wants to be the sole judge as to what speech is offensive, misleading or false. Meritus is afraid of open debate of DEI in the medical field, so they choose to silence and cancel those that don’t agree with them. If Meritus wasn’t afraid of open debate, they never would have terminated Brad.
