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U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception
An anonymous reader writes In a legislative first, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that for-profit companies can, in essence, hold religious views. Given the Supreme Court's earlier decisions granting corporations the right to express political support through monetary donations, this ruling is not all that surprising. Its scope does not extend beyond family-owned companies where "there's no real difference between the business and its owners." It also only applies to the contraception mandate of the health care law. The justices indicated that contraceptive coverage can still be obtained through exceptions to the mandate that have already been introduced to accommodate religious nonprofits. Those exceptions, which authorize insurance companies to provide the coverage instead of the employers, are currently being challenged in lower courts.
The "closely held" test is pretty meaningless, since the majority of U.S. corporations are closely held.
Go get all the abortions you want, but private businesses have the option to not pay for it.
So I hope that a business can refuse to pay for it even without having to pretend to believe in an invisible man in the sky..
If not, I hope one of them sues, because the government is then preferring one religion over another.
(I think this, and many other things, should be paid for by the person themselves...)
put their religion before the constitution. Shocking.
Religious fuckers are destroying this country.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
To start with Hobby lobby was NOT against contraceptives, and offered it to their employees. They were against 'after the fact' options. Like "plan B".
Avoiding the truth was a plan to harass and go after them using media bias, much like Chick-fil-A was attacked.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Superstition trumps health care for women.
It was a few hundred years before that when corporations were created as legal persons who could purchase ships, undertake voyages, be sued, etc.
The whole idea of a corporation is that me, you, and a hundred other people can pool our resources to do something big, such as buying and outfitting a ship (or ISP), and if something went wrong a creditor could take the ship and its cargo, but you wouldn't be risking your house. As a legal person, the corporation could be sued, rather than filing 100 law suits against each of the individual investors, none of which could pay the judgement.
You bitch about paying for welfare kids, and you bitch about women not wanting kids to abort them. PICK ONE AND STFU!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'll be cool with the ACA mandating equal pricing for the genders when my auto insurance company is held to the same standard.
Shakrai, male, 32, 790 FICO score, zero moving violations, zero accidents, six month premium for 2012 Honda Civic: $450
Shakrai's ex-gf, female, 31, 710 FICO score, three moving violations, two at fault accidents, six month premium for 2011 Honda Civic: $390
Same liability limits, I had higher physical damage deductibles, and a 10% discount for defensive driver training that she lacked, both through Progressive.
I wonder when the big man at 1600 Pennsylvania is going to fix this gender disparity?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Healthcare is a form of compensation, just like your wages, your employer can not tell you how to spend your wages, why can they tell me what healthcare services I can utilize? Also, companies don't "pay" for healthcare like its some sort of charity they generously give to there subjects, employees pay for it themselves by providing work for the company!
This is really bad.
Lets see how quick other companies jump on this bandwagon and try to push it further.
I am betting we will actually see a few companies trying to say that modern medicine is against their religion and opt for prayer healing instead. Or maybe a few companies may use this to force their employees to follow their religious dress codes to deter employees and a whole other barrel of monkeys on this one.
Honestly, what CAN'T you do based on a religion? Especially when people can actually make up their own religion if they can get enough support, and I am betting that if enough rich people get behind one, they can make an official one with all kinds of cost effective religious practices.
the idea of "when life starts" which is a philosophical, not a scientific problem
Pro-life scientists point out that an embryo is a distinct organism because it has distinct DNA. The life associated with that DNA thus begins when sperm meets egg.
Coupling the two has always been a cluster fuck. This is just one more reason to abolish this particular linkage.
Corporations are people too.
As in the Citizen's United case, this ruling is a complete perversion of constitutional rights on the American Public, and both as abominable as Plessy v. Ferguson. Here's the train of logic that the majority took:
1) Take a piece of legislation originally designed to protect sacred American Indian worship sites, though more broadly individual religious freedoms,
2) And extend those freedoms to corporations with this hocus-pocus incantation: "The purpose of extending rights to corporations is to protect the rights of people associated with the corporation, including shareholders, officers, and employees." (573 U.S. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Syllabus, pg. 3)
And while I was never a fan of Ginsburg in my younger years, given the recent evolution of the SCotUS, that opinion is rapidly changing, especially when she has this to say on the matter (573 U.S. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Ginsburg dissent, pg. 14):
Until this (Citizens United) litigation, no decision of this Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law...the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities. As Chief Justice Marshall observed nearly two centuries ago, a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 [1819]).
Should just rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution now to read, "We the Corporations of the United States..."
on the one hand it means religions, er, corporations, can discriminate against everything from blood transfusions to births without circumcision, but...it also means the opinion shreds whatâ(TM)s known as the corporate veil (the principle that establishes a corporation as a distinct entity from its owners or shareholders). This would mess with a lot of businesses and how they do business.
Hobby Lobby 'also for all its piousness' has a retirement plan that invests very heavily in the manufacturers of the forms of contraception it claims to abhor so much. make of that what you will.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is not the philosophy of liberty; this is the philosophy of a religious oligarchy.
If we indeed has 100% employment and people could easily float between jobs it would be a win for freedom. But since people are frequently stuck with the job they have it is a loss. Because now the people with the money get to impose their religious doctrine on their employees.
Saying they ARE people is a power grab ...
The US Supreme Court did **not** say that corporations are people. A spokesperson for the losing side in the court case gratuitously characterized the decision that way, in other words it was just political spin on the decision.
What the Court actually said is that
(1) Groups of people have the same free speech rights are individual persons.
(2) It doesn't matter what the nature of the group of people is; corporation, labor union, public interest group, etc.
If this actually sticks:
Oh, wait, nevermind, as soon as someone sues them there'll suddenly be a "real difference" again and mommy government will ride in to save them from their actions.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
We need a 28th Amendment to the Constitution - All rights specified in the Constitution of the United States and all Amendments thereto shall apply to Natural Persons only.
We can call it the Commonsense clause.
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Completely, 100% wrong. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. That's all it is. Anything else, *anything*, is an add on from some other idea. I'm absolutely, completely, atheist -- I hold no belief in a god or gods whatsoever -- but I am not opposed to religion, in fact, I can cite you chapter and verse as to many of the benefits religion brings, and has brought, to our society. I live in a church. What I am opposed to is any particular religion getting control of law and/or government. Because that has demonstrably caused harm almost without surcease. But again, even this is not a consequence of my position that the idea of god or gods is ridiculous, rather it is a consequence of my observation that every religiously influenced law I know of is extremely bad law, and furthermore, tends to favor group A over group B in such a way that there is no sane basis for it.
Theism: Belief in a god or gods.
Atheism: Without belief in a god or gods.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The solution to the problem is to not incorporate. Then one can run the business however they want.
Keep in mind that a corporation is a government-created entity in the first place. The charters are granted by state or federal government. Essentially, they can (should) set the rules by which the corporation's extra-legal benefits are given.
Essentially, if your own skin isn't in the game (your personal assets are shielded from your failed company), it isn't "your" business anymore.
Why is this story posted here? How is this news for nerds?
"Citizens_United" Corporations are people too.
In the Citizens United case the US Supreme Court did **not** say that corporations are people. A spokesperson for the losing side in the court case gratuitously characterized the decision that way, in other words it was just political spin on the decision.
What the Court actually said is that
(1) Groups of people have the same free speech rights as individual persons.
(2) It doesn't matter what the nature of the group of people is; corporation, labor union, public interest group, etc -- any organization will do.
WRONG.
It doesn't matter what license or charter you get from the government, whether sales tax license, medical license, bank charter, corporate charter, or drivers license - your rights are your rights and they cannot be separated from you. A charter or license cannot come with a "speech code," or a religious requirement, or waiver the government to get a search warrant.
A moments reflection would reveal how undesirable it would be to live under such a government.
... the currently-leftwing government ...
You have GOT to be kidding. There is no left-wing in the US mainstream.