For those not aware, Hobby Lobby does not want to cover IUDs or "Plan B" morning-after contraceptives, because the Hobby Lobby believes* religiously that such contraceptives are actually abortives, and life is sacred, and women are baby-making chattel who should be punished for sex with reduced risk of pregnancy, etc... So Hobby Lobby is challenging this in the Supreme Court, under the rubric of HOW DARE the government force corporations to either offer health care insurance for women in almost equal proportions as it would for men (except of course actual abortions), or pay a fine for not providing required health care insurance (which is actually less than the cost of providing health care insurance)?
I've heard it covered in the media a bit recently; the part not covered so far as I can tell, of course, is that Hobby Lobby is playing directly with make-believe, because IUDs and morning-after pills are contraceptives, not abortives. I understand I guess- because of the rampant dumbs and everything- but am mildly baffled that no one points this out at every turn of the court case and in the media; rather the notion goes unchallenged.
So I hope they lose the shit out of this case; and I hope they get pregnant in their ear canals.
*Which is exactly who? Their shareholders are all the same religion? their executive board? Their employees?
There are Quakers whose consciences really won’t permit them to pay federal taxes. Many of them manage that by making sure they don’t make enough money to incur tax liability. They live on far less than they could earn if they were willing to pay taxes, but they’re willing to make that sacrifice, because their conscience demands it.
Now along comes Hobby Lobby, demanding a consequence-free exemption to paying for birth control on the grounds that it violates their conscience.
Back in 2011, I wrote:
If your conscience prohibits you from dispensing legal medication, then your conscience prevents you from being a pharmacist. Full stop.
If your conscience prohibits you from performing abortions, then your conscience forbids you from taking a position where abortions are part of the job. Full stop.
I know firsthand that it can be hard to pass up opportunities that violate your conscience. But that is the price you pay for conscientious objection.
If you’re not willing to pay that price, you’re not a Conscientious Objector. Full stop.
If the Green family’s conscience really forbids them from meeting their legal obligations under the Affordable Care Act, then they have the option to arrange their lives so as not to incur those obligations. They can choose not to run a two billion dollar corporation.
But if they’re not willing to make those sacrifices–if their ‘conscience’ only compels them so far as they can follow it for free–then they are not conscientious objectors.
And they and their fake conscience objection can get the hell off my lawn.
This whole case is such a load of horseshit, from the lies about "abortificants", to the notion that a corporation somehow has religious beliefs that can be burdened, to the idea that it's any of an employer's business what their employees do with the recompense they receive in exchange for their labor, but the bit you posted hits the heart of it. No one twisted anyone's arm and forced them to get rich running a big corporate enterprise. If you can't handle the responsibilities of running a corporation, you're perfectly free to stop running a fucking corporation.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
On many levels, the Hobby Lobby case is a mess of bad facts, political opportunism, and questionable legal theories that might be laughable had some federal courts not taken them seriously. Take for instance Hobby Lobby's argument that providing coverage for Plan B and Ella substantially limits its religious freedom. The company admits in its complaint that until it considered filing the suit in 2012, its generous health insurance plan actually covered Plan B and Ella (though not IUDs). The burden of this coverage was apparently so insignificant that God, and Hobby Lobby executives, never noticed it until the mandate became a political issue.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Those of use who don't have our heads firmly planted in our anal cavities, realize that having your employer provide health insurance is a bad idea. It adds an HR layer to the insurance company layer, and government layer, and actual healthcare provider layer.
If we all had a single payer system then I could have healthcare at work, between jobs, while retired, after I'm right sized, etc. Every couple of years my company wouldn't have to shop for better rates, sign us all up for new plans, jack my premiums because one guy in the company got cancer and used $1.5 million in insurance that year. Blah, Blah, Blah.
Of course Hobby Lobby, Inc (Incorporated in Christ) would still say any taxes that might go to that are immoral. But I doubt they really care about Jesus anywho since he was poor and urged you to be too, hung out with degenerates and prostitutes, poked at the establishment, didn't like preachers, and was generally against violence.
I think they just wanted a reason to get Sundays off to go fishing and drink beer and it got out of hand.
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Last edited by ImGod; 03-26-2014 at 05:28 PM.
Reason: to not sound as stoopid
Finally I just feel compelled to note how much of Hobby Lobby's inventory is made in China, where contraception is mandatory, and that's not even getting into the forced abortions thing. I guess the Greens are "pro-lifers" of convenience.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
What I don't get is companies like this are all up in arms about contraception slut pills for women, since according to them if you give women easy access to them they will want to have sex with anything that moves.
However I never hear of an organization like Hobby Lobby get up in arms about all the erectile dysfunction dick pills being pushed upon men. I mean it takes a man and a woman to have sex (in their world), so isn't preventing men from having sex just a valid as providing disincentives to woman?
But then I remember that this whole issue really isn't about sex, it's about controlling women. Men good, women bad (it all goes back to that bitch Eve in the garden of Eden). Allowing women any means to regulate pregnancy gives them power, and we know what happens when we do that (see Garden of Eden).
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The best way to make America great is to lower the standards!
No one twisted anyone's arm and forced them to get rich running a big corporate enterprise. If you can't handle the responsibilities of running a corporation, you're perfectly free to stop running a fucking corporation.
You said it much better than these clowns:
Quote:
Congress and the courts have been sensitive to the needs flowing from the Free Exercise Clause, but every person cannot be shielded from all the burdens incident to exercising every aspect of the right to practice religious beliefs. When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity. Granting an exemption from social security taxes to an employer operates to impose the employer's religious faith on the employees.
United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252, 261 (1982) (emphasis added) (denying Amish jerkoff's demand for a First Amendment-based religious exemption to employer's portion of the social security tax).
These cases (there are two of them in the Supreme Court at the moment) are multi-faceted train wrecks. The court of appeals decision in the Hobby Lobby case is here.
Hobby Lobby and Mardel, Inc., two closely held for-profit corporation owned and operated by the same family, and their owners/managers sued the government claiming that the so-called "contraceptive mandate" regulation promulgated pursuant to the Affordable Care Act violates their rights under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The plaintiffs moved for a preliminary injunction right out of the gate. Basically, they demanded an order holding that Hobby Lobby and Mardel need not comply with the "contraception mandate" while the lawsuit is pending. A party seeking a preliminary injunction must prove four things to the trial court judge's satisfaction, the first and foremost of which is that s/he has a likelihood of succeeding on the merits.
Back in 1993, members of a Native American religious group asked the Supreme Court to rule that the Free Exercise Clause prohibited the state from punishing them for sacramental use of peyote. That argument repulsed Scalia to no end, and he was able to persuade four of his colleagues to join in a spectacularly broad decision under which any law that's religion-neutral and generally applicable on its face, even if it incidentally burden religious exercise, is constitutional so long as it's rationally related to any legitimate government interest. Pretty much all laws are "rationally related" to a "legitimate government interest" as the courts use those phrases.
Some freaked-out and butthurt members of Congress threw together the abomination known as RFRA, which provides in relevant part:
Quote:
(a) In general
Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, except as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
(b) Exception
Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—
(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that RFRA is unconstitutional as applied to state and local governments, but it still applies with full force to the federal government. Of course, the regulation at issue here is federal.
The trial judge in the Hobby Lobby case denied the preliminary injunction request. The judge ruled that: (1) for-profit corporations don't have free exercise rights under the First Amendment; (2) the individual plaintiffs have such rights, but are unlikely to win because the "contraceptive mandate" is a generally applicable, religion-neutral law that's rationally related to a legitimate government objective, which is all the Free Exercise Clause requires; (3) for-profit corporations aren't "persons" as that term is used in RFRA; and (4) the individual plaintiffs are "persons" for purposes of the statute, but are unlikely to win because the "contraceptive mandate" doesn't substantially burden their exercise of religion.
Hobby Lobby et al. then tried to get an injunction from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and later from Justice Sotomayor, the circuit justice for this here part of the country. Both attempts failed.
Courts of appeals usually decide cases in three-judge panels. In this case, the Tenth Circuit granted Hobby Lobby's request for an en banc determination right out of the gate. Eight court of appeals judges participated in deciding the case.
A 5-3 majority of the appellate court ruled that: (1) Hobby Lobby and Mardel are "persons" for RFRA purposes; (2) by requiring coverage for birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, the regulation at issue imposes a substantial burden on practicing the religious belief that life begins at conception; and (3) the government has thus far failed to establish that the reg is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest. Thus, according to the majority, the corporations proved a likelihood of success on the merits. The same majority ruled that the the corps established the second of the four elements needed for a preliminary injunction, namely irreparable harm. The court sent the case back to the trial judge with instructions to rule on the third and fourth elements.
As the many opinions amply demonstrate, all the issues are analytically messy. Hell, a sizable number of 10th Circuit judges don't think the individual plaintiffs have standing at all.
I gots no idea how this is going to end up. One experienced SCOTUS reporter attended yesterday's oral argument and thinks the Court is split 4-4 along ideological lines, with Kennedy providing the all-important-but-impossible-to-read deciding vote.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
This is such bullshit. How is it that the employees privacy rights (both medical and sexual) are not infringed upon by the corporation exercising religious freedom during a financial transaction or whatever? Why is that not a consideration?
how is the morning after pill not abortive? like...if a sperm got through the night before and you happen to believe that's when life begins (as i do), does not the morning after pill stop the process?
but yeah...i don't see how an IUD is abortive.
oh and i'm just a modern guy because i've had it in the ear before.
The morning after pill is just a huge dose of normal Birth control pills.
Birth control, Morning after and IUDs all reduce the ability for the egg to implant onto the uterine wall but they don't dislodge it once implanted.
This is such bullshit. How is it that the employees privacy rights (both medical and sexual) are not infringed upon by the corporation exercising religious freedom during a financial transaction or whatever? Why is that not a consideration?
No reason that they can't get their own healthcare in addition to, or instead of, their employer's, is there? Why not have another person added to the ACA exchange?
You can go around in circles. Can an employee insist that the company cafeteria serve halal meals every day? Can an employer insist upon a fast during lent? I don't think there is a particular 'judgement' to be made on those merits, it's a pure subjectivity. The question is whether the corporation is a 'person' under the RFRA, which seems an easier question for the judges to deal with. Shades of Citizens United, perchance.
The difference between abortive and contraceptive seems to be a bit of a red herring to me. I don't know if it's still the case (Not paying much attention to the Holy See, as I don't), but I think the Vatican has issues with contraception as well.
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A man only needs two tools in life. WD-40 and duct tape. If it moves and it shouldn't, use the duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40.
Did the fact that Hobby Lobby offered employee health insurance that already covered birth control, including the morning after pill, before Obamacare come into the argument at all? They didn't seem bothered by it until the law demanded it. I'd say that would play into any argument about whether or not their religious values were infringed by having to have this coverage in their health insurance plans.
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Last edited by Dingfod; 03-27-2014 at 02:57 PM.
Reason: wording
This is such bullshit. How is it that the employees privacy rights (both medical and sexual) are not infringed upon by the corporation exercising religious freedom during a financial transaction or whatever? Why is that not a consideration?
No reason that they can't get their own healthcare in addition to, or instead of, their employer's, is there? Why not have another person added to the ACA exchange?
You can go around in circles. Can an employee insist that the company cafeteria serve halal meals every day? Can an employer insist upon a fast during lent? I don't think there is a particular 'judgement' to be made on those merits, it's a pure subjectivity. The question is whether the corporation is a 'person' under the RFRA, which seems an easier question for the judges to deal with. Shades of Citizens United, perchance.
The difference between abortive and contraceptive seems to be a bit of a red herring to me. I don't know if it's still the case (Not paying much attention to the Holy See, as I don't), but I think the Vatican has issues with contraception as well.
There's no reason that the corporation has to choose and administer a group health plan at all. They can simply pay their employees extra to get their own if they want to offer a benefit.
I don't see how including contraception in a comprehensive health plan for employees interferes with another's free exercise of religion anyway. Nobody is being forced to use contraception against their religious beliefs. Nobody is being forced to stop worshiping as they see fit because one of their employees has an IUD. Conversely, isn't Hobby Lobby imposing their religious beliefs on their employees (who may or may not share them), and invading their privacy by dictating what health care they have access to on their company plan? Does HIPAA not apply?
If the coverage is required to include blood transfusions, and the owners are Jehovah's Witnesses, can they sue on religious freedom grounds?
This is such bullshit. How is it that the employees privacy rights (both medical and sexual) are not infringed upon by the corporation exercising religious freedom during a financial transaction or whatever? Why is that not a consideration?
This is probably really naive on my part, but I think it just comes down to the fact that the Constitution protects us from the government only. It doesn't say anything about whether non-government employers and corporations can infringe on our rights.
Also, as a business person, it seems to me that Hobby Lobby's attitudes that led to the lawsuit could easily create an environment that is hostile for employees that don't share those beliefs and attitudes.
So put me on the books as predicting an employee lawsuit along these lines sometime fairly soon.
This is such bullshit. How is it that the employees privacy rights (both medical and sexual) are not infringed upon by the corporation exercising religious freedom during a financial transaction or whatever? Why is that not a consideration?
This is probably really naive on my part, but I think it just comes down to the fact that the Constitution protects us from the government only. It doesn't say anything about whether non-government employers and corporations can infringe on our rights.
Medical privacy extends to everyone I am pretty sure via HIPAA. It is entirely possible that this isn't a medical privacy issue as it relates to the law, but it seems like it could, or should even.
As for sexual privacy, again I don't think corporations can get all up in your bedroom. Accessing email and texts, though heinous, is agreed to by users when they subscribe to a service, and certain things are agreed to when you take a job.
This is such bullshit. How is it that the employees privacy rights (both medical and sexual) are not infringed upon by the corporation exercising religious freedom during a financial transaction or whatever? Why is that not a consideration?
This is probably really naive on my part, but I think it just comes down to the fact that the Constitution protects us from the government only. It doesn't say anything about whether non-government employers and corporations can infringe on our rights.
Right, I'm just thinking they're counting on the constitution, bill of rights, first amendment, etc. to trump HIPAA, the ACA, or any other "lesser" laws. I'm not saying they're right, of course.
Well, since those particular contraceptives are only useful by women, maybe someone can get gender in there too and make it a full on clusterfuck of competing rights.
Anyway, I still can't believe the courts consider corporate entities as people in the first fucking place, so who knows what they'll do with all these issues.
You can go around in circles. Can an employee insist that the company cafeteria serve halal meals every day? Can an employer insist upon a fast during lent?
Or is it true that "for-profit corporations can be forced to pay for abortions," as Justice Kennedy quipped to the Solicitor General during oral argument. That comment, more than anything else that's happened to date, makes it look like the contraceptive reg's days are numbered.
Quote:
Originally Posted by California Tanker
The question is whether the corporation is a 'person' under the RFRA, which seems an easier question for the judges to deal with. Shades of Citizens United, perchance.
That's one of the questions, and it looks like a straightforward matter of statutory interpretation that constitutional law needn't enter into at all ... OR IS IT?
RFRA doesn't have its own definition of "person." The Dictionary Act sez:
Quote:
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise—
. . .
the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals[.]
So a corporation, even a for-profit corporation, is a person for RFRA purposes "unless the context indicates otherwise." Check out Section V.A. of the Tenth Circuit majority opinion and Section III.B. of Judge Briscoe's dissent to see how convoluted that issue can get.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dingfod
Did the fact that Hobby Lobby offered employee health insurance that already covered birth control, including the morning after pill, before Obamacare come into the argument at all?
Not at this stage, but that's a very juicy issue for the government to hammer on at trial.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyShea
There's no reason that the corporation has to choose and administer a group health plan at all. They can simply pay their employees extra to get their own if they want to offer a benefit.
Exactly, and that's one of the reasons the "contraception mandate" that the plaintiffs in these cases are bitching about doesn't really exist. That seems like a p. important point that's kinda gotten lost in the wingnut rhetorical shitstorm.
And its even worse than that. Employers get a tax break for providing employees with coverage. So Hobby Lobby wants the full tax advantages that come with setting up a self-funded employee heath coverage plan but, in violation of generally applicable, religion-neutral rules that everyone has to follow, wants to pick and choose what coverage it provides.
So, as always, any scenario doesn't involve government giving away public money to the religious constitutes savage persecution of Christianity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyShea
I don't see how including contraception in a comprehensive health plan for employees interferes with another's free exercise of religion anyway.
If government can use my tax money to pay for other people sending their kids to private religious schools -- and the Supreme Court says it can -- then there's nothing even remotely wrong with this contraception reg.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyShea
Does HIPAA not apply?
Nope, not at all.
__________________
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
Anyway, I still can't believe the courts consider corporate entities as people in the first fucking place, so who knows what they'll do with all these issues.
If corporations are people, I want company liquidation to be considered murder and the CEOs that destroyed the company jailed.
It struck me recently that Corporations as people is just a hidden way to bring back the old 'only white male land owners are considered voting citizens' ideals of revolutionary times. Sure they can't vote... yet, but they certainly have more political sway than voters and are comprised mostly of you guessed it.
Sorry for the probably stupid question, but if SCOTUS finds that corporations aren't people for RFRA purposes, does that weaken the finding in Citizen's United that they are people?
Anyway, I still can't believe the courts consider corporate entities as people in the first fucking place, so who knows what they'll do with all these issues.
If corporations are people, I want company liquidation to be considered murder and the CEOs that destroyed the company jailed.
It struck me recently that Corporations as people is just a hidden way to bring back the old 'only white male land owners are considered voting citizens' ideals of revolutionary times. Sure they can't vote... yet, but they certainly have more political sway than voters and are comprised mostly of you guessed it.
Conversely, one should be able to seek imprisonment (or the death penalty) when suing corporations for their roles in crimes.
If they get all the benefits of personhood, they should get the same responsibilities and liabilities.
Oh, but wasn't the point of incorporation to limit liability?
It seems like they're trying to change incorporation into a method for the rich and powerful to have all the benefits of citizenship without any of the responsibilities, de jure.
Fuck Hobby Lobby right in the ear hole
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