Hobby Lobby Triumphs over its minion workers

Archbob

Archbob

Ancient CFC Guardian
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Corporate USA
Not sure how I feel about this actually. On one hand, I don't believe corporations are people, on the other hand, they are private and family held. Technically they could just fire all their female employees since they are privately held and aren't the government or publically held.
 
Justice Ginsburg said:
Would the exemption the Court holds RFRA demands for employers with religiously grounded objections to the use of certain contraceptives extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations (Christian Scientists, among others)?
Click to expand...
Sums it up.

What if my religion requires the use of intravenous drugs?
 
Supreme Court hits new low: Only 30% have confidence in justices

We know Americans don’t have much confidence in Congress or President Obama, but it turns out the Supreme Court is also slipping in the public eye.

On the same day the justices ruled on a controversial case dealing with Obama’s contraception policy, a new Gallup Poll finds only 30% of Americans have confidence in the Supreme Court — a record low for the judicial branch. The findings also represent a 7-point drop for the Supreme Court since 2012.

The court ruled 5-4 on Monday that closely held companies cannot be forced to offer insurance coverage for contraception methods that they equate with abortion. The court’s decision in what’s known as the Hobby Lobby case is a blow to Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which included the so-called contraception mandate.

In the Gallup Poll, confidence in Congress reached a record-low 7% while faith in Obama hit 29% — a six-year low for the presidency.

Justin McCarthy writes for Gallup that faith in the presidency and the high court are usually closely rated — with the executive and judicial branches coming within six or seven points of each other in polling since 1991.

But confidence in the Supreme Court has slipped steadily since its heydey during the Reagan administration, when 56% of Americans said they believed in the high court in 1985 and 1988. The ratings for the court mostly stayed in the 40s and 50s but took a sharp turn down to 34% in 2007 — a year after George W. Bush won Senate confirmation for Samuel Alito to the court.
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http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2014/06/30/supreme-court-confidence-gallup-poll/
 
i'm shocked by this.

but then again I never expected a unanimous decision about the cell phone stuff, so hmpphh.

What does this mean for state that refused the medicare expansion??
 
So if corporations are effectively people now does that mean their limited liability status is now void?
 
JollyRoger said:
Fairly narrow ruling - pretty much a one day ticket for closely held companies to be religious bigots.
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It still sets a dangerous legal precedent for people to have the right to pick and choose what laws they get to follow based on their religious beliefs and that is something I just do not agree with. Personal morality should never be allowed to trump the rule of law.

This article I think is a pretty good summary of the slippery slope the Supreme Court just put us on:

The owners of a chain of stores called Hobby Lobby don't like Obamacare. In particular, they really don't like the part that requires insurance companies to cover contraceptives. Normally, people who don't like a law petition the government to change that law. That's how a nation of laws works.

But these men are Christians. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Christian business owners are special. Their deeply held religious belief that some particular form of contraception is immoral carries more weight than the force of law, five conservative Christian justices ruled. The court -- in a fairly bald admission that its ruling is incoherent -- added that no general amnesty from other laws should be assumed to be the result of its ruling and that its reasoning was strictly limited to women's contraception. Such a limitation raises legitimate questions about the rather perverted and obsessive minds of the five men who made the ruling, but it also carries little legal weight. Precedent is precedent, whether the precedent-setters say so or not.
Click to expand...

The bolded part rings especially true. Whether the Supreme Court realizes it or not, they just set a legal precedent that could end up severely weakening our entire legal system.

Link
 
In Heller, the Supreme Court granted a very limited right to bear arms and has held firm in other gun control being presumptively valid. I don't think the holy rollers get much more Christo-sharia than they got here.
 
its not shocking the supreme court's approval rating is dropping, they keep granting more protection to businesses and their "peoplehood" status while turning around and giving individual people very little protection. So many of their decisions are 5-4 partisan rulings that it just is feeling like an extension of congress's bickering rather than a non-biased legal review of laws. if the court was done properly every judge would be an unpredictable swing vote rather than there being like one swing vote and partisan votes for the other 8.
 
How expensive is birth control without insurance? I'm personally an anti-fan of the healthcare law, so any part of it being curtailed I'm generally for, but I know women who have to use certain forms of birth control not as contraceptives, but to regulate their cycles.
 
If only Al Queda had incorporated - the Court could have granted them a religious exemption from the law banning the crashing of planes into buildings.
 
Technically speaking, this doesn't affect birth control. It affects things like the "morning after" pill that prevent an already fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall. Which is not abortion, of course, as any sane person can tell. It affects 4 specific drugs which do this.

But what's insane is the court ruled that...
"The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients."

An abortifacient is "a drug or device used to cause abortion". These drugs are not abortifacients, but because the people who run Hobby Lobby *believe they are*, they don't have to cover them. Mind-boggling.

This is from the actual ruling on how they made their decision...
"It employed the familiar legal fiction of including corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons,” but the purpose of extending rights to corporations is to protect the rights of people associated with the corporation, including shareholders, officers, and employees. Protecting the free-exercise rights of closely held corporations thus protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control them."

They even called it a legal fiction! Weird. Crazy, really. Corporations now have religious beliefs, apparently.

"HHS and the dissent nonetheless argue that RFRA does not cover Conestoga, Hobby Lobby, and Mardel because they cannot “exercise . . . religion.” They offer no persuasive explanation for this conclusion."

Seriously? This ruling is just baffling on so many levels.
 
classical_hero said:
About time the 1st amendment is taken seriously by the Supreme court.
Click to expand...

:lol:

Hobby Lobbyists said:
The contraceptive mandate, as applied to closely held corporations, violates RFRA. Our decision on that statutory question makes it unnecessary to reach the First Amendment claim raised by Conestoga and the Hahns.
Click to expand...
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-354_olp1.pdf

The Court actually blew off the 1st Amendment and instead relied on a statute signed into law by Bill Clinton.
 
We wouldn't have this problem with a proper single payer system.

Really putting this into the hands of corporations just begs for these kind of chip to be taken out by corporations, and even then while this ruling will obviously be bad for society it's hard to say that it is wrong per se. After all why should they be forced to pay for something they don't believe in? Really we should have had single payer and kept the companies out of the process, but with the ACA we explicitly included companies in everyone's healthcare, and now we pretend to be offended when they start mucking it up?
 
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