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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.
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.
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I's insurances, IT goes into a pool. Telling people they can't use it because of someone else's religion is THE single most unConstitutional thing they could have done.
IT's not freedom, it's religious zealotry. This is the same shit that change the mideast from a open democracy in the 40-5 and 50s into the religious cluster fuck it is now.
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Unfortunately we can extend that to a variety of things. Do your 'sincerely held religious beliefs' outlaw blood transfusions? Looks like your exployees are going to be paying for that themselves. Organ transplants? I'm sure insurance companies would love that. Like many things, the problem isn't the scenario at hand. Its the precedent and how it will be abused.
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 ----
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!
Perhaps I misunderstood.
Who said the employee couldn't use contraception? The employee is still free to obtain and use contraception on their own or through a provision - it just isn't forced upon the company to purchase it which seems equally fair. In addition to the employee purchasing (or using the provisions) for the contraception, then they are also free to work in another with/without religious beliefs who will purchase it.
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..."
But an employer has no more right to say how an employee uses a benefit as they do their earned money.
Oh, really? They do it all the time. An employer's very choice to give you a particular defined benefit rather than the money they pay for it is itself saying how you can use it. Just try to get a large employer to give you the money in lieu of the benefit. Or even to buy a different kind of insurance plan than the one they dictate. Good luck with that.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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.
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.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
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.
"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.
This would be meaningful if any of the following were false:
To my mind, this money belongs to the employees as part of their health benefits package, and the employees should have the ultimate decision on how money is spent on their health.
Not quite.
The law requires, as part of that "minimum level of coverage" that preventive healthcare to be covered by all insurance plans at zero out of pocket cost. ie, no copays, no cost sharing, no coinsurance, etc. Instead they are paid out of premiums only. One of those preventitive things is contraception.
So if a company buys a plan for its employees, it much meet those minimums.
Hobby Lobby objected to the requirement for contraception.
The legal way out for HL was just NOT PROVIDE INSURANCE, in which another part of the law would kick in, and the employees, having no employer sponsored plan, would then be eligible for subsidies on the exchange, and the company would pay a pentaly (the stick of the carrot/stick approach in the law to incentivizing companies into sponsoring insurance; the carrot is the massive tax break they get for it).
But HL didnt want to pay a penalty.
And HL also still wanted their tax break.
So, HL still wanted to ffer insurance....just without meeting the minimum requirements.
HL wanted all the benefits of hte law, without the requirements of it.
They wanted their cake, and to eat it too.
And unfortunately for the country, they got it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And one of those types are IUDs. My wife has one of those to regulate endometriosis which can be quite painful to deal with. Her doctors recommended using it instead of the normal birth control pills (which she has tried in the past) and it works. The fact that this works as birth control is a side benefit. (We already have 2 kids and don't want/can't afford any more.) However, this ruling would give an employer the right to say "we object to this because of 'religious reasons' so we're not going to cover it in your employer provided health care." Then, if we wanted this device to manage my wife's medical condition, we'd be forced to pay full cost out of pocket.
However, if I needed "little blue pills" and was employed at Hobby Lobby, they would be more than happy to provide them to me. They also see nothing wrong in investing in the contraception companies in their 401K. Apparently, making money off of "godless abortion pills" is perfectly fine religiously.
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