Well.....for one, they're implicitly taking a particular religious stance by allowing a group of conservative Catholic Christians to deny health coverage on particular items, like the "morning after pill" to their employees. While SCOTUS may not be explicitly stating, "Catholic Christian beliefs on the sanctity of life begin at conception," they ARE allowing for employers to impose these beliefs on the people who they employ. The following Supreme Court Justices are Catholic - Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Sotomayor. The one with the vagina, Sotomayor, was the only Catholic to break rank on this one. Probably because SHE HAS A VAGINA and realizes that having a vagina basically means that your life as you know it, as you planned, as you can manage, can all come to a halt if you're not careful. And that doesn't really seem to matter here, which also, implicitly stated by the justices ruling in favor, is that women have to be more careful than men when it comes to their habits (especially of the sexual sort).
There might have been a stronger case if the employers, in this instance, Hobby Lobby, was not a craft store and was a religious institution, you know LIKE A CHURCH, but it is not. Simply because YOU, the employer, are Catholic with conservative beliefs does not mean that your employees are, unless these employees were severely vetted before being hired at a store that is open to the secular public and sells sequins and beads.
So now for SCOTUS, if there is another case of an employer barring their employees from receiving health coverage on particular medications or procedures that they do not believe in, it will be interesting to see if they, 1. are hypocritical and do not apply the same logic to other groups like Jehovah's Witnesses or Christian Scientists or Muslims, or if, 2. the rights of the religious in power (as in employer v. employed) continue to make headway, tightening the invisible noose religion holds over this country's Constitution over and over again.
Furthermore if my employer wanted to have a real discussion about my personal beliefs and my medical coverage beyond very general parameters, I would tell them to fuck off. If I were on Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering drug, but I was eating egg salad sandwiches every day at lunch, would you deny me coverage? Probably not. 1. because it's none of your business what types of medicine I take and 2. this only happens when it comes to women's reproductive rights. Over and over again, the stuffing of your religious beliefs down everyone else's throats MAKES US RESENT your beliefs. I don't believe in a god at all, let alone YOUR god. If you're an employer and you're that insistent that everything needs to fit in line with your religious beliefs, go open a church or a religious charity with your ambition. Additionally, don't invest in contraceptive companies' stocks to diversify your retirement portfolios, idiots.
The US is NOT a Christian nation by any sort of decree; in fact, it was set up to be the opposite of a state where there was a centralized religion. The founding fathers were admittedly Deist, which means that they were not the good Christians people like Sarah Palin tout them to be. The Palins of the world (or their handlers) have the wherewithal to use religious beliefs to manipulate the masses of people into fearing that their way of life, their ritual is somehow in danger by the existence of others.
If we are going to go all Biblical on everything, I am going to sue my employer for serving cheeseburgers in the cafeteria, and for not providing a menstruation hut for not only myself, but for all of the unclean, menstruating women that are commingling with the general population any given day of the week. So if a religious game is going to be played - bring it. Let's go ALL OUT. Christian law shall reign supreme. Sharia law is so scary for many conservative Christians because it's the imposition of a foreign hegemony, and we would all agree that nothing feels as comfortable as our own cocoon of ignorance. But Sharia "law" and Conservative Christian "law" are both predicated on the same antiquated models of control, especially over women.
Sure, I am being irreverent and rude right now, but sometimes mockery is the best policy for getting through to people. In the 18th century, when the Irish were starving due to crop failures and British-imposed impoverishment, the ruling classes were shocked into facing this moral dilemma head-on by essayist Jonathan Swift. His satirical work, A Modest Proposal, suggested that the suffering Irish sell their children as food to the ruling classes so there were less mouths to feed and more money to go around to the survivors. My modest proposal to the owners of Hobby Lobby and their ilk is the same, go big and instate a Conservative Christian theocracy in the US. See how you like it, because I am guessing you won't (re: Oliver Cromwell was an aberration to the British system of constitutional monarchy, not a high point. His program of Puritan control was not well received and was not continued on after his death - it was an experiment and one that ended in failure).
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