SCOTUS today: 2 HUGE deicisions

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‘Hobby Lobby’ Is About Blocking Contraception Access, Not Religious Liberty

When Hobby Lobby sued—and won—for a right to be exempted from the Affordable Care Act regulation requiring employee health-care plans to cover contraception without a copay, the official claim from both Hobby Lobby and its conservative defenders was that this was not an attempt to deprive women of contraception. No, the official argument was that it was simply an attempt by Hobby Lobby’s religious owners not to be party to behavior they consider immoral by “paying for” it.

Well now the Obama administration has created a workaround that more than satisfies the official claim that this isn’t about preventing contraception use; it’s just about not participating in it. All employers who have this oh-so-sincere belief, all they have to do is send in a letter formally declaring that contraception violates their religious doctrines, and they won’t have to pay for it. Instead, the insurance company will just pay directly. No big surprise here. But the supposed defenders of religious liberty are already outraged, because that’s never been what this is about. Rather, it’s about imposing anti-choice dogma on people who don’t agree with it.

If the actual concern was participation in behavior that violates religious principles, then the Obama administration’s new policy should more than address that. All that is required is a statement of principles. People make sincere statements of religious belief in order to get religious exemptions from laws all the time. Conscientious objectors to the draft, for instance, had to make such statements. It’s not considered a burden because there is no shame in expressing a belief you legitimately hold.

If, however, the “sincerely held” argument is a dishonest gambit to cover up for the real goal among much of the right—depriving women of contraception and asserting employer ownership over their private lives—then we can expect that conservatives will reject this new policy. After all, while it meets the stated demand of accommodating religious belief, it does not prevent women from getting affordable contraception outright.

Anyone who has been watching the right become more overtly anti-contraception in recent years can probably guess what is happening: Conservatives are throwing a fit over this. “The government keeps digging the hole deeper,” Adèle Auxier Keim of the Becket Fund, which represented Hobby Lobby in its suit, told U.S. News and World Report. “The government still won’t give up on its quest to force nuns and other religious employers to distribute contraceptives.”

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/07/15/hobby-lobby-blocking-contraception-access-religious-liberty/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig n=Feed%3A+rhrealitycheck+%28RH+Reality+Check%29

Repugs, Christian Taliban supremacists are obsessed with the sex lives of women (only, not men).

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Will Native American religious freedom count as much as Hobby Lobby's?

Members of the San Carlos Apache tribe, as well as other members of the Apache nation and Native American groups, have exposed a national travesty on the part of Arizona senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, both Republicans. At the very last minute, the two senators attached a policy rider to a must-pass spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. That rider ended 60 years of federal protection of Oak Flat, an ancient Apache holy place located within the Tonto National Forest, and handed the land over to a private, Australian-British mining concern. It's now a proposed site for a massive copper mining project. Members of the Apache tribe spoke with Think Progress about their efforts to have this law repealed.

"It's our sacred land—it's where we come to pray," Carrie Sage Curley, an Apache woman, told ThinkProgress. […]"I have a great-grandmother who is buried at Oak Flat, we want to respect her, let her rest in peace," said Sandra Rambler, an Apache woman from San Carlos, Arizona, told ThinkProgress. "My granddaughter had a [religious] dance there last year, and I’m hoping that my future grandchildren will dance there as well."

The religious connections to Oak Flat are so powerful that mining the land could cons ute a violation of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. That law, which was passed in 1978, stipulates that the federal government has an obligation to protect the religious liberty of Native Americans—including guaranteeing access to sites they hold sacred.

"It's the same thing as a church," Curley said. "We protect these temples, why can't we do the same for our sacred land?"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...28Daily+Kos%29

VERY interesting. Will the courts respect N-A's religious freedom as they respect BigCorp's religious freedom?

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Appeals Court Thwarts Evangelical Pharmacists’ Objections To Filling Prescriptions

Something every human being experiences is an inner sense of what is right or wrong in one’s conduct that impels them toward right action founded on the complex ethical and moral principles that control or inhibit their actions or thoughts.

For an alarming number of Americans, their thoughts and actions are not driven by their inner sense of right and wrong, or their conscience, but rather what their bas ized Americanized Christianity tells them is right and wrong.

Since demigod Ronald Reagan’s administration, the religious right inculcated in their weak-minded followers that what is morally right is using their religious conscience to control and impose their will on other Americans; particularly American women.

In that sense, the American religious right’s conscience is identical to the extremist ISIS and Taliban conscience in that their “inner sense” informs their religious right to force compliance to their religious concept of right and wrong.

In America, the idea that a Christian’s conscience gives them authority to withhold medical services from non-compliant Americans is the foundation of the various Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRA) being passed in theocratic Republican states.

For the record, those “religious freedoms” were not restored from a previous time; they are a relatively new concept first introduced by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in the late 1970s to early 1980s and quickly embraced by theocratic extremists in the religious right movement.

However, those so-called “religious freedoms” to use “religious conscience” to deny medical care were dealt a setback this week in Washington state.

According to a unanimous decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, “pharmacy owners do not have a cons utional religious right to refuse to dispense medicines.”

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/07/28/appeals-court-thwarts-evangelical-pharmacists-objections-filling-prescriptions.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_mediu m=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+politicususa%2FfJAl+%2 8Politicus+USA+%29

Misogynist religious theocrats kicked in their black hearts again.

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religiously affiliated nonprofits can't block contraceptive coverage:

A federal court of appeals ruled today that religiously affiliated nonprofit employers can’t block their employees’ health care coverage for contraceptives. The ruling finds that the plaintiffs, which include Catholic health care systems and Catholic high schools, are not burdened by having to formally object to covering contraceptives for employees. The ACLU supported the government’s arguments by participating in a friend-of-the-court brief.

“Today’s victory is not only incredibly important for the more than 12,000 employees who stand to gain contraception coverage, but it also sends a clear message that an employer’s religious beliefs can’t be used to deny health care benefits to employees,” said Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “We fight hard to protect religious freedom at the ACLU, but that right doesn’t allow employers to discriminate against their female employees.”

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Today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the religious accommodation in the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive rule imposed no substantial burden on the plaintiffs’ religious freedom. The plaintiffs challenged a requirement that employers that object to including contraceptive coverage in their employee’s insurance plans notify their insurers or the government of their objection. The insurer must then arrange and pay for the contraceptive coverage separately.


With the decision today, the Second Circuit joins six other circuits that have found that the accommodation poses no substantial burden on the nonprofits’ religion, including the D.C., Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits. No circuit court has ruled the other way.

https://www.aclu.org/news/catholic-h...ge-court-rules

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Move to Amend Rejects US Court of Appeals Decision in National Association of Manufacturers v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

On Tuesday, panel of US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has issued a decision in National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) v. US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), holding that publically-traded corporations have a First Amendment right to hide whether their products contain conflict minerals from the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the majority opinion, two out of three judges on the panel struck down a DC Circuit en banc ruling upholding regulations requiring businesses to disclose a product’s country of origin, ruling such disclosure rules only apply to advertisements.

“Rulings such as this one send the message that so-called corporate ‘rights’ actually trump ‘We the People’s’ rights. In this case a corporation is hiding behind the First Amendment to avoid accountability for their actions, and the Court has ruled their right to secrecy is more important than the public’s right to know,” stated Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, National Director of Move to Amend. “We reject this opinion and call on the American people to build a movement to amend the U.S. Cons ution to make clear that corporations do not have Cons utional rights.”

Move to Amend is a rapidly growing national grassroots coalition of nearly 400,000 individuals and thousands of organizations working to pass a cons utional amendment to state that Cons utional rights belong to human beings only, not to corporations and other artificial en ies, and that campaign spending is not a form of protected speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated. The group formed in in 2009 in preparation for the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commissionruling on January 21, 2010. Their We The People amendment was introduced in the US House of Representatives on April 29, 2015.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire...-manufacturers

C-U gonna screw Americans and America for decades. Thanks, Repugs!

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Conflict Mineral Ruling 'Sets Dangerous Precedent' on Corporate Personhood

'A corporation is hiding behind the First Amendment to avoid accountability for their actions, and the Court has ruled their right to secrecy is more important than the public's right to know.'

Ron Fein of Free Speech for People said the ruling would have implications beyond conflict mineral disclosure. "[T]hese judges are coming for the entire set of transparency laws that help make our stock markets the most trusted in the world," he said. "And perhaps they won't stop there; according to these judges, nearly every disclosure or sunshine law in modern society is now subject to corporate First Amendment challenge."

Zorka Milin, senior legal advisor at Global Witness, agreed. "Today's decision affects not only the conflict minerals rule but could also be exploited by companies to bring legal challenges to other corporate transparency laws," she said in a statement.


"The convoluted logic of the decision is a perversion of the First Amendment and intrudes on the mandate of a democratically-elected Congress," she continued. "Given the potential implications of the ruling, in particular, the warped interpretation of the First Amendment, we urge the court to reconsider and overrule this decision."

http://www.commondreams.org/news/201...ate-personhood

Human-Americans can know almost nothing about Corporate-Americans, but Corporate-Americans violate H-A's privacy every minute of every day.

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Appellate Court Judges Cite '1984' to Expand Corporate First Amendment Rights

A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a decision on Tuesday supporting a deeply-cherished belief of many huge corporations: that the First Amendment shields them from government requirements to provide information about their products.

The case involved a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act ordering corporations to disclose their use of “conflict minerals” from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC is rich in minerals used in cell phones, laptops and many other gadgets, and demand for them has helped fuel what’s been called “Africa’s World War.”

In finding for the National Association of Manufacturers, the D.C. Circuit judges declared that to be uncons utional compelled speech.

There have been some similar previous cases. In 2011, tobacco companiessued the Food & Drug Administration on First Amendment grounds and stopped it from requiring them to put graphic photographs of the effects of smoking on cigarette packages.

But when the wonderfully-named American Meat Ins ute sued the Department of Agriculture to try to roll back regulations forcing them to tell consumers where the animals they’re eating were born, raised and slaughtered, they lost.

What’s most noticeable about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals conflict minerals decision — written by George H.W. Bush appointee Raymond Randolph and joined by Reagan appointee David Sentelle — is that it reads less like a dispassionate legal treatise and more like an extremely long, nicely-typeset right-wing blog post.

For instance, Reynolds muses, “If the government required labels on all internal combustion engines stating that ‘USE OF THIS PRODUCT CONTRIBUTES TO GLOBAL WARMING’ would that be fact or opinion?” Of course, that would be a fact, but to Reynolds it’s merely “the opinion of many scientists.”

But best of all are his quotations from both 1984 and Darkness at Noon — perhaps the two most famous anti-totalitarian novels ever written. The citations don’t make much sense wedged into the decision, but the implication is clear: forcing Apple to tell you whether there’s tantalum from Congoin your iPad is the kind of thing Joseph Stalin would do.

Obama appointee Sri Srinivasan strongly disagreed, noting that the government justifiably requires public companies to disclose lots of facts they would rather keep to themselves. But he was outvoted 2 to 1.

The ruling is yet more evidence that the current extremist ideology of corporate America and its judicial allies is not going to moderate itself.

They have a specific future in mind for us — one in which the Cons ution protects all huge corporations and no actual humans — and they’re doing everything they possibly can to make it happen.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...lict-minerals/

America is ED by VRWC/Repugs and is un able.
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Catholic hospital denies pregnant Michigan woman’s request to have her tubes tied

A pregnant Michigan woman told her hospital that she would like to have her tubes tied after she delivered her third child because of a tumor in her brain.
However, according to the Washington Post, her Catholic hospital has refused to perform the procedure citing religious laws against reproductive sterilization.

Jessica Mann is 33. Her doctor suggested that due to the risk from an inoperable tumor in her brain, she should take pains to prevent future pregnancies after the birth of this baby, who is due next month. Mann decided to have a tubal ligation while under anesthesia during the upcoming birth.

Her hospital, however — Genesys Regional Medical Center — has refused to allow the procedure to take place on its premises.

The University of Illinois’ Robin Wilson explained to the Post that religious ins utions like Catholic hospitals have “iron-clad” legal protections against being forced to perform abortions, vasectomies or tubal ligations.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/cath...e+Raw+Story%29

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Texas Judge blocks ACA transgender rule:

https://assets.do entcloud.org/doc...-v-Burwell.pdf.

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Texas Judge blocks ACA transgender rule:

https://assets.do entcloud.org/doc...-v-Burwell.pdf.

Christian Taliban imposing their hateful, weaponized Christian Sharia

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The last time there was a union vote, SCOTUS was 4-4

Now with the pro-oligarchy/employee-hating ideologue Gorsuch, it would be extremely surprising if the SCOTUS does not vote 5-4 to destroy public sector unions, and allow non-union employees to "free-ride" the benefits of working alongside govt employees who due pay union membership.

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Fate of public unions may rest with Supreme Court


The Supreme Court Monday seemed poised to overturn a 41-year old ruling that requires some government workers to pay certain fees even if they're not union members, in a case that could hurt the political power of public employee unions.

The rationale for the original ruling was that the so-called agency or "fair share fees" cover part of the cost of contract negotiations - and that all public sector employees benefit, even those who opt out of the union.
Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee who brought the present case, argues that a state law requiring him to pay the fees violates his First Amendment rights — because the unions engage in political activity and he might be forced to support views with which he doesn't agree.
“The fundamental issue is my right to choice,” Janus said on the Supreme Court steps after the court heard arguments.

Public-sector unions say the case could adversely affect millions of government workers across the country,

Neil Gorsuch, who became the ninth justice after Scalia, could prove to be the pivotal vote, but did not weigh in during arguments.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supre...ry?id=53349617

Janus is being financed and pro-bono'd by the oligarchy wanting to destroy public sector unions so the oligarchy can pocket their salaries.