So the Supreme Court has ruled that religious fanatics are entitled to invade people’s bodies. How very unsurprising.
Brainless freaks.
Making Fun of the Constitution
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
So the Supreme Court has ruled that religious fanatics are entitled to invade people’s bodies. How very unsurprising.
Brainless freaks.
Clarissa's Blog 
What was the ruling about (for not USA readers)?
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I’m ineffectually mad because I’m on the job market right now in search of a job, in a place where anti-abortion activists have parties on the sidewalk and nobody offers health insurance.
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A summation.
The text of the decision
If more than half of a company’s stock is held by less than five people, for profit companies do not have to provide insurance coverage of birth control in their employer provided health plans and can take a religious exemption. The religious exemption applies to explicitly religious entities like the Catholic Church or related businesses (like Bible selling companies, for example.) What’s dismaying is that most people who have insurance get their insurance through their employers. You can buy insurance on the market but it’s much more costly to the point of being prohibitive for most people. Under Obamacare, people can’t be denied insurance for preexisting conditions but the law says nothing about the price you will pay.
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In the United States most people get health insurance (of various qualities) from their employer as an outgrowth of a temporary World War II law which taxed money but not benefits for large corporations at a time when there was a wage freeze. People buy health insurance because the out-of-cost cost of medical care can be 20x or more than the cost of that same care with insurance.
Over 90% of U.S. companies have 50.1% of their stock owned by less than five people, so in practice if Walmart, the nations’ biggest employer decides they have a religious objection to birth control and contraception, no Walmart employee will get it through employer provided insurance.
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I also love how Hobby Lobby invests in companies that make abortion and contraception products, including the ones they object to offering their female employees: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2014/04/01/hobby-lobby-401k-discovered-to-be-investor-in-numerous-abortion-and-contraception-products-while-claiming-religious-objection/
They could have chosen not to invest in these companies, if such products violated their religious conscience to such an extent.
Also, the justices said that their ruling doesn’t necessarily apply to things like vaccines and blood transfusions, for which there are also religious objections. Just women’s reproductive health. So it’s women’s bodies we’re talking about. Not people’s.
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Why is America so determined to go back to the stone age?
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Do you think though that entities should be forced to do things that go against their religious beliefs though? IMO, things like this are one of the reasons the way the healthcare law is structured was a bad idea. Forcing private companies to have to provide this and that just opens up a huge can of worms.
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I think that people should be free to choose to use birth control or not to use birth control according to their own beliefs. I think that birth control is something that everyone should expect to be covered by their health plan, and if most people are expected to get health coverage from their employer, then it is something that the employer should need to accept whether they like it or not. I would prefer if we had single-payer, but we don’t. I think the real “can of worms” that is being opened is what other kinds of coverage an employer can refuse to provide that goes against their religion. What about religions that don’t believe in blood transfusions? What about the ones that don’t believe in modern medicine at all and think prayer should be the go-to cure for everything?
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Things Nobody Forced Hobby Lobby To Do:
1.Provide insurance to their employees. They always had the option of paying the fine.
2. Invest employee pension funds in companies that make birth control. Employees pay into their employer provided pension fund by having funds taken out of their paycheck. Employees pay their insurance premiums by having funds taken out of their paycheck. What is the substantive moral difference?
Invest employee pension funds in companies that make birth control.
To avoid supporting companies that manufacture abortion drugs—or products such as alcohol or pornography—religious investors can turn to a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen out stocks that religious people might consider morally objectionable. The Timothy Plan and the Ave Maria Fund, for example, screen for companies that manufacture abortion drugs, support Planned Parenthood, or engage in embryonic stem cell research. Dan Hardt, a Kentucky financial planner who specializes in faith-based investing, says the performances of these funds are about the same as if they had not been screened. But Hobby Lobby’s managers either were not aware of these options or chose not to invest in them.
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—What about religions that don’t believe in blood transfusions? What about the ones that don’t believe in modern medicine at all and think prayer should be the go-to cure for everything?
From the conservative perspective (which I do not share, but I understand the logic of it) sexual abstinence is a desirable condition, and definitely not something life threatening. Thus, the issue of birth control is fundamentally different from issues of blood transfusions or any other issues where religion might interfere with the cure for some disease. Also, from the conservative viewpoint, any consequences of a free choice are person’s own responsibility, unlike consequences of illness. Thus, contraception issues are, for the conservatives, in the same category as participation in “extreme sports”, skydiving for example; many insurance companies make exceptions to injuries resulting from extreme sports accidents.
Again, I repeat, I do not subscribe to these views, and I believe there should be one government-run health insurance system, for many reasons, including preventing anyone’s religious beliefs (be that business owners or even the majority of population of the given state) from interfering with anyone’s choices, as long as said choices are legal. I do not see why religious convictions should be above any other convictions. Suppose I am a pacifist. Why can’t I opt out of paying whichever percentage of my taxes goes to the military?
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“Things Nobody Forced Hobby Lobby To Do:
1.Provide insurance to their employees. They always had the option of paying the fine.”
Hobby Lobby wants to provide insurance to their employees, including contraceptives. There are just four specific contraceptives that they are against. They could just pay the fine and not provide any insurance, but if they provided insurance but not the four contraceptives, it would cost them an extremely large amount of money each year in fines.
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“I think that birth control is something that everyone should expect to be covered by their health plan, and if most people are expected to get health coverage from their employer, then it is something that the employer should need to accept whether they like it or not. I would prefer if we had single-payer, but we don’t.”
Me personally, I do not believe any employer should be forced to provide something if it fundamentally goes against their religion. I do understand the opposite side of the argument though, about what other things then could an employer not cover. Single-payer BTW is not the only form of universal healthcare system. Some of the best universal healthcare systems, such as Germany’s, France’s, Switzerland’s, the Netherlands, etc…are not single-payer. They are multi-payer, public-private systems.
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Regarding the Constitution, how does the Constitution protect a law from the government requiring companies provide things like contraceptives? I can understand arguing that it protects a right to have an abortion via the right to privacy (and even that is a stretch according to some who support abortion rights*), but I don’t get where it protects the government mandating a company do such a thing.
*In terms of whether the Constitution protects abortion itself, that has nothing to do with whether abortion is a right. If it was found that the Constitution did not protect it, then that is where hopefully it could be amended to explicitly protect the right (as we have done in the past for other rights). Whether abortion is a right and whether the Constitution protects the right are two separate arguments.
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“how does the Constitution protect a law from the government requiring companies provide things like contraceptives?”
It doesn’t, the constitution is at least as much about things the government can’t do rather than what it can do. But despite the status of the constitution as a semi-holy text for some people it’s been dead in the water for about 40 years. It may be revered but the government hasn’t been following it except for occasional bouts of lip service.
It’s been degraded to a blunt weapon for those with opposing political views to whack each other over the head with.
I’m all in favor of some kind of universal healthcare but it has to be de-coupled from private insurance interests (and probably be state-based rather than federal).
“I can understand arguing that it protects a right to have an abortion via the right to privacy”
Not the strongest of grounds either. I think a ninth amendment interpretation as roughly the government shall not abridge a citizen’s right to bodily integrity / make their own healthcare choices.
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Cliff, the Constitution provides that we shall have a president, a congress, a supreme court, and other courts as congress shall from time to time ordain and establish. How exactly are these provisions “dead in the water”?
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“How exactly are these provisions “dead in the water”?”
The surface form is being followed, but in a lot of ways the content isn’t with the steady expansion of the federal government (the original design was of course state centered) and in the government joyfully trashing the fourth amendment with NSA snooping (to give two examples).
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