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you ing idiot, Viagra, etc is drug to treat a medical problem.
In the Christian Taleban madness to block contraception (which is not even an abortion), they also removed contraception as medical treatment, you ing idiot.
I know, and that point is irrelevant Hobby Lobby's objection on religious grounds. I'm not aware of any Christians having problem with the pill.
you ing idiot, Viagra, etc is drug to treat a medical problem.
In the Christian Taleban madness to block contraception (which is not even an abortion), they also removed contraception as medical treatment, you ing idiot.
Contraception violates christian morals. Viagara doesn't. What aren't you understanding?
Boo either not understanding what a contraceptive is, or the scope of this case
no, it doesn't. I bet every damn pastor's wife in USA has used contraception, and a bunch of them and their daughters have had abortions
the contraception pretext is nothing the Hobby Lobby perverts/Christian Taleban imposing their narrow morals, a power play in the Christian/conservative War on Vaginas, on their FEMALE employees
Christians are hypocrites. Again, bc violates christian beliefs. Viagara doesn't.
Not true. The decision probably extends to condom subsidies too, beginning the Christian/conservative War on s, on their MALE employees.
Guaranteed, Boutons has never had sex in his entire miserable life, so of course he doesn't know this stuffBoo either not understanding what a contraceptive is, or the scope of this case
i accept. how much we betting for?
he's going to refute that claim by spamming several articles from liberal blogs, tbhGuaranteed, Boutons has never had sex in his entire miserable life, so of course he doesn't know this stuff
The pill is still covered by hobby lobby's insurance policy you ing dip . If a female hobby lobby employee wants the morning after pill or an IUD I suggest she find another job or pay for it out of pocket.
You mother must have been told you were a mistake baby all your life, its the only logical reason this gets you so outraged. If only she could have been given free morning after pills or better yet learned to keep her legs shut.
Actually SCOTUS clarified that it is not. Didn't say they could fire them for using it, just that they didn't have to pay for it.
Personally I am pro-abortion and pro birth control. Just find it hilarious how Boo and Fuzzy are freaking out over the decision.
Believe it was just morning after pills and IUD's they don't have to cover. Regular birth control pills still covered iirc.
Scotus clarified the decision.
the "day after", the SCOTUS5 said their ruling covered ALL forms of contraception, not just those few mentioned the Monday.
And hobby lobby will still cover the pill.
The decision continued a dangerous precedent regarding the rights of corporations that started with Citizens United. However, this one will hurt Republicans a lot more than Citizens United did. The right wing is already hailing the Hobby Lobby decision, and you can bet every Democrat in the country is going to use that against them in the midterms this fall. The war on women has become a very powerful wedge issue for Democrats. It arguably won them the governor's race in Virginia last fall. Combined with Republican's fear to touch immigration after Eric Cantor was sacked, conservatives are painting themselves into a corner.
‘Hobby Lobby’ Is Just the Beginning: A Flood of Corporate Religious Objections Is Coming
The Roberts Court does nothing in small measures, so when Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority inBurwell v. Hobby Lobby, insists the decision granting closely held corporations religious objection rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is limited only to the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act, don’t believe him. It’s not.
Like the Court’s decision in McCullen v. Coakley and Town of Greece v. Galloway, which also greatly advanced conservative causes but under the guise of “limited” First Amendment opinions, the decision in Hobby Lobby is an exercise in radical incrementalism. The 5-4 majority decision did not strike altogether the birth control benefit, nor did the decision rule broadly that corporations have First Amendment religious rights independent of the RFRA—but it set the path for future courts to do so.
Take first the issue of whether or not secular, for-profit corporations are “people” under the RFRA. As Justice Alito notes, the legal fiction of corporate “personhood” exists largely to provide protections to their individuals. What Justice Alito doesn’t note is that protections have never before been used to burden the rights of employees to the benefit of corporate owners.
Alito writes:
When rights, whether cons utional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protections to corporations protects the privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations’ financial well being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.
In order to find corporations can exercise religious beliefs, Alito must conflate two very different scenarios.
The first involves cases where the legal interests of employers and employees are largely aligned against those of the government;
the second includes cases like Hobby Lobby, where corporate interests are trying to hide behind cons utional protections to deprive their employees of their rights.
It’s a quick, but important, conflation that makes it possible for Alito to continue in the rest of his opinion to ignore the interests Hobby Lobby employees have in being free from religious discrimination by their employer.
With that judicial sleight-of-hand accomplished, Alito moves on to the larger question of just how a corporation can exercise these newly found religious rights. As it turns out, corporations practicing religious beliefs is remarkably simple, and just because a corporation seeks to maximize profit doesn’t mean it can’t do so in the name of religion:
While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. … If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
Did you catch that? If some corporations can support charitable causes, Justice Alito reasons, why not allow others to pursue religious causes such as avoiding complying with federal law?
As if sensing the alarm bells ringing in the wake of just proclaiming the existence of corporate religious rights, Justice Alito is quick to point out that because both Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation are “closely held corporations,” the Court’s order is limited to similar businesses. Justice Alito doesn’t go so far as to say that the decision actually limits religious objections to those kinds of businesses—it just notes that no publicly traded companies have raised religious objections to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) like Hobby Lobby. Yet.
Having firmly established that closely held corporations (and probably publicly traded ones as well) can assert religious objections under the RFRA, the Court turns its attention to the birth control benefit specifically.
And here is where the Court’s deeply ingrained misogyny shines brightest.
Justice Alito writes that the Hahns and the Greens—the families who, respectively, own Conestoga Wood Specialties and Hobby Lobby—have a sincere religious belief that life begins at conception and that their religious beliefs provide both that they offer insurance coverage for their employees, but only insurance coverage that conforms to those religious beliefs. Justice Alito takes this as an opportunity to misstate the coverage requirements of the ACA. “Before the advent of the ACA, they were not legally compelled to provide insurance,” wrote Alito, “but they nevertheless did so—in part, no doubt, for conventional business reasons but also in part because their religious beliefs govern their relations with their employees.”
Of course, the ACA does not require employers to provide any health insurance coverage for their employees. Instead, the law requires those employers that do provide health insurance coverage offer that coverage equally for both men and women.
This a la carte type of coverage, where employers maintain ultimate veto authority over the scope of employee benefits, is of course the endgame to all these contraception challenges, and by opening the door to religious objections like Hobby Lobby the Court has set the stage for just that.
The parties in Hobby Lobby sincerely, and wrongly, believe that emergency contraception and some forms of intrauterine devices (IUDs) act as abortifacients. But according to Alito, it doesn’t matter that the Greens and Hahns are wrong. All that matters is that they sincerely believe they are right.
[I]n these cases, the Hahns and Greens and their companies sincerely believe that providing the insurance coverage demanded by the HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] regulations lies on the forbidden side of the line, and it is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial. Instead, our “narrow function … in this context is to determine” whether the line drawn reflects “an honest conviction” and there is no dispute that it does.
The decision is a bad one. So bad, in fact, that Alito spends the rest of his attention in the decision explaining that the Court’s conclusions are not as radical as they appear.
“HHS and the principal dissent argue that a ruling in favor of the objecting parties in these cases will lead to a flood of religious objections regarding a wide variety of medical procedures and drugs, such as vaccinations and blood transfusions, but HHS has made no effort to substantiate this prediction,” Alito writes. “HHS points to no evidence that insurance plans in existence prior to the enactment of ACA excluded coverage for such items. Nor has HHS provided evidence that any significant number of employers sought exemption, on religious grounds, from any of ACA’s coverage requirements other than the contraceptive mandate.”
HHS provided none of the evidence Justice Alito asks for because, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg points out in her dissent, “until this litigation, no decision of the Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law, whether under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA.” In other words, that evidence didn’t exist because until this decision no corporation had made those kinds of claims.
Alito must really be concerned that his opinion will be dismissed as radical because his next move is to suggest that what the Obama administration really wants to do is force insurance coverage for abortions. If only!
“It is HHS’s apparent belief that no insurance-coverage mandate would violate RFRA—no matter how significantly it impinges on the religious liberties of employers—that would lead to intolerable consequences,” says Alito. “Under HHS’s view, RFRA would permit the Government to require all employers to provide coverage for any medical procedure allowed by law in the jurisdiction in question—for instance, third-trimester abortions or assisted suicide.”
Alito continues:
In any event, our decision in these cases is concerned solely with the contraceptive mandate. Our decision should not be understood to hold that an insurance-coverage mandate must necessarily fall it if conflicts with an employers’ religious beliefs. Other coverage requirements, such as immunizations, may be supported by different interest (for example, the need to combat the spread of infectious diseases) and may involve different arguments about the least restrictive means of providing them.
In other words, it’s not discrimination if it affects women, and it’s probably not discrimination if it affects the LGBT community either.
Oh, and there’s a good chance conservatives will use this opinion to launch a broader attack on civil rights protections in the name of religious liberty even though (wink wink, nudge nudge) the Court is only concerned with the contraceptive mandate.
Not surprisingly, it took Justice Ginsburg more than 30 pages to dispense with that dangerous nonsense in a scathing dissent that simply shreds Alito’s claims that his opinion is a narrow one.
In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs. Compelling government interests in uniform compliance with the law, and disadvantages that religion-based opt-outs impose on others, hold no sway, the Court decides, at least when there is a “less restrictive alternative.”
And such an alternative, the Court suggests, there will always be whenever, in lieu of tolling an enterprise claiming a religious-based exemption, the government,i.e., the general public, can pick up the tab.
This is not the first time Justices Alito and Ginsburg have been on opposite sides of a gender employment discrimination case. Last term, while Justice Ginsburg was reading from her dissent in Vance v. Ball State, the case that severely curtailed who is considered a supervisor for purposes of sexual harassment claims, Justice Alito rolled his eyes at claims she made that the decision didn’t reflect the realities of workplace harassment. It was a rare moment of displayed hostility by a sitting justice toward a colleague, but one that perfectly captures the disdain Alito shows for women, and especially women workers.
Like she did in Vance, Ginsburg schools Alito on the workplace barriers women face, and once again it’s clear Alito doesn’t care.
Ginsburg writes:
In the Court’s view, RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith—in these cases, thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga or dependents of persons those corporations employ.
But just what kind of accommodation will satisfy the conservatives on the Roberts Court remains an open question. Justices Alito and Kennedy suggest accommodating corporate religious beliefs the same way the administration is currently trying to accommodate nonprofit religious beliefs as one possibility. Naturally, the Court withholds judgment on whether it believes the current religious accommodation is actually cons utional, and with cases winding through the appellate courts on that very question, that’s very much a live issue, as is nearly every issue in these cases.
Just how far do corporate religious rights extend? Who knows.
Will federal courts be put in a position to pick and choose which religious beliefs are sincerely held and which ones are not? It looks that way.
Will the decision be used to enable employers to object to providing other health-care services, like HIV treatments? Seems likely, but we’ll have to wait for the lawsuits.
In fact, it seems Monday’s decision really only answered one question:
When given the opportunity, will conservatives on the Court rule against the fundamental humanity of women?
The answer is yes. Every time
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/20...ality+Check%29
If there were a hard-core, universal govt-health-insurance, this Corporate-American "our bull _sincere_ beliefs trump all laws and negate all science" would be moot.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-03-2014 at 08:27 AM.
Doctors, nurses condemn Hobby Lobby ruling, call for immediate action
The 5-4 decision was immediately criticized by the American Medical Association, theAmerican Nurses Association (PDF), the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for allowing employers to meddle in the exam room.
The decision “intrudes on the patient-physician relationship and will make it more difficult for many women to make their own personal medical decisions,” said Dr. Robert Wah, president of the AMA.
“We encourage the administration to provide alternative pathways to secure coverage for patients unable to obtain these services as a result of the court's ruling.”
Each of the groups urged officials in Washington to work quickly to restore coverage options for all insured women, saying that limiting insurance coverage would force women to take additional steps or pay out of pocket for birth control—which affects low-income women in particular.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...28Daily+Kos%29
The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg's Dissent on the Hobby Lobby Contraception Decision
"in a decision of startling breadth," would allow corporations to opt out of almost any law that they find "incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs."
Here are seven more key quotes from Ginsburg's dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby:
"The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would…deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs access to contraceptive coverage"
"Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community."
"Any decision to use contraceptives made by a woman covered under Hobby Lobby's or Conestoga's plan will not be propelled by the Government, it will be the woman's autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults."
"It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage."
"Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived frompigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today's decision."
"Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be 'perceived as favoring one religion over another,' the very 'risk the [Cons ution's] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude."
"The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...lobby-decision
The little old Jewish lady taking her vicious handbag, and her superior legal mind, to the 5 Repug/Catholic justices.
WHy didn't Hobby Lobby ban 16 of the 20 contaceptives including the pill that is taken for medical reasons?
As Ruth's dissent said:
After Hobby Lobby, Faith Groups Reject Push To Perpetuate Discrimination Against Gays On Religious Grounds
the day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to exempt closely-held corporations from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate on religious grounds, a group of 14 prominent faith leaders sent a letter to the President arguing that faith-based nonprofits that use federal funds but who do not embrace sexuality should be exempt from the order.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/0...tter-pushback/
Since the REPUG SCOTUS5 "opinion" (aka "fact free") says to "sincerely believe" some religious is all that's needed to be Hobby-Lobby-Legit, let's try this one:
I "sincerely believe", with The Lord Jesus Christ as my witness, based on the scientifically/historically PERFECT Word of God in the Bible:
"Book of Genesis ("And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell" (Gen. 4:5), suggesting that Cain underwent a permanent change in skin color.
In an Eastern Christian (Armenian) Adam-book (5th or 6th century) it is written:
“And the Lord was wroth with Cain. . . He beat Cain’s face with hail, which blackened like coal, and thus he remained with a black face".[21] "
http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_and_mark_of_Cain
... that My-God-Cursed "The Negro" is not fit to served by my company, or the front of my bus, or use white man's toilets, drinking fountains.
That'll do it! yeah! My SINCERE BELIEFS trump all laws.
Fall out on both cases has come rapidly. It is expected that over 70 corporations could drop birth control coverage now, thanks to the Supreme Courts allegedly “narrow” decision.
If the President asks Congress to find a work around, such as a better way to make sure that birth control is subsidized, well, conservatives want to see that nipped in the bud, too, since apparently that would offend the religious liberties of some tax payers and as such is not allowable.
Allegedly, there is a compromise answer both sides of the aisle are supposed to agree on, and that’s allowing over the counter pill sales. But while that may sound like a good idea, it doesn’t address the expense issue (after all, take a look at the costs of other OTC medicines, which you can’t subsidize with a co-pay), or the fact that you can’t get an IUD or other long acting reversible contraception that way, which are both the most effective and have the biggest price tags up front.
Of course, conservatives really want OTC contraceptives not because they think people should have the ability to prevent pregnancy, but because they hope that would put Planned Parenthood out of business. Once again, that is always the end goal.
The buffer zone ruling has had immediate impact as well.
Abortion opponents are celebrating with walks in Boston now that the buffer is down. Long time “sidewalk counselors” are testing the new limits and joyously embracing the ability to get up close and personal with patients again. What’s most interesting about the articles written about the return to the sidewalk post buffer ruling is the number of people who are also quoted when the ruling went into place.
One example is Ruth Schiavone, who felt thwarted when the buffer went into place in 2007, and who suedto get the original bubble law tossed prior to that (the original bubble was replaced by a buffer because police found it too hard to enforce). Looking at Schiavone’s interactions with violating the prior order shows how careful lawyers were when they picked a face for their case.
As Massachusetts deals with their new buffer-less cities,
Montana feels confident their bubble is legally sound.
In Minnesota a new Planned Parenthood is being protested despite it not offering abortion.
In Ohio, a Cincinnati clinic may close after a judge has ruled its transfer agreement isn’t good enough to pass local muster, a sure sign that Ohio really is planning to pick off all of their clinics one by one.
The “medical experts” who run Operation Rescue are touting the death of a patient in Cleveland as a sign of the dangers of abortion. The argument lies on a massive amount of assumptions, of course. Considering the group can’t even seem to remember that a fetus that is just over 19 weeks gestation is not actually “a few days from Ohio’s legal limit,” which is 24 weeks gestation according to the later abortion ban Ohio passed in 2011, their medical knowledge should be taken with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, National Right to Life Committee’s Mary Spaulding Balch is admitting to the fact that abortion really isn’t more dangerous than childbirth, and is safer than many other medical procedures.
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell is promising more abortion restrictions on a federal level if he is reelected and Republicans take over the Senate.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/24789...rights-rulings
Reason #1 SCOTUS Will Regret Hobby Lobby
That separation is what legal and business scholars call the "corporate veil," and it's fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it's in question. By letting Hobby Lobby's owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.
So says Alex Park, writing in Salon today.
"If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?" Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.That's a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby's argument and hold the veil in place. Here's what they argued:
Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.
This is definitely going to complicate things for the religious extremists on the SCOTUS and empire wide as these lawsuits inevitably proliferate. Putting on the popcorn....now.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...?detail=email#
false alarm, if "punctured corporate veil" case hits SCOTUS5, they will obviously, incomprehensibly, undoubtedly, contradictorily rule in favor of corporations
you do realize nobody here reads your spam, don't you?
does not care. he's like a cat covering his turds.
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