Slashdot Mirror
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.
(I think this, and many other things, should be paid for by the person themselves...)
That's kind of the crux of the matter, isn't it? A month of generic birth control pills costs about $10/mo. Purchased in bulk, condoms are about $0.50/ea. Both are readily available at no cost from a variety of sources for those who can't afford them. Setting aside the heated political debate, it seems foolish to route these sorts of purchases through your insurance company, with inevitable overhead, rather than simply purchasing them yourself.
Of course, low information voters on both sides eat this shit up. It's red meat for the bases of both political parties.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
My religion says that killing is wrong. Can I refuse to pay the percentage of taxes which goes to the military?
Getting hormonal birth control from a doctor other than your regular doctor means that those two doctors have to both have access to your medical records or both consult on any issues you might have
Isn't that the whole point of the push for EMRs? And what stops her from seeing the regular doc then getting the script filled at a clinic? Or just paying the $10/mo for it? My insurance company isn't giving me free condoms, and I don't have any get out of jail free cards made available to me if my birth control fails.
Condom breaks and the woman doesn't want a kid with the guy? She can take the morning after pill, get an abortion, or give the child up for adoption. Man doesn't want a child with this woman? Too bad asshole, we're going to confiscate 15% to 25% of your post-FICA earnings for the next 18 years, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, even if she broke the condom in the first place or lied about being on pills.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
earned benefits are the property of the employee. There were already mechanisms in the ACA that would have shielded an employer from "paying" for abortion. But an employer has no more right to say how an employee uses a benefit as they do their earned money. This decision will not stand the test of time. It will fall in a like manner that the Bowers v. Hardwick case was revisited and overturned decades later with the majority opinion admitting the SCOTUS had been "wrong".
Corporations have ONE religion, and that is to make as much money as possible.
Except many of them don't, of their own choice. They put their profits into humanitarian endeavors. Especially corporations such as the one that owns Hobby Lobby., where the owners' religious beliefs preclude a lavish lifestyle.
They are under common law obligations to screw over people to do so.
This has been stated on this board repeatedly, and it is completely incorrect. The person who explained the court case to you was either lying to you, functionally illiterate and unable to make sense of a court paper, or simply parroting lies that had been said to them earlier. Please read Dodge v Ford Motor Company, and stop parroting this lie to others.
Tto say they have religious convictions is absurdity at its finest.
You obviously have to clue what is actually the case here, with this corporation. As a non-religious person myself, I find it unfortunate that your own feelings about religion override your sensibilities.
Watch the abuse begin. It's the latest slip down the slippery slope started in 1800s when the absurd idea of "Corporate Personhood" started.
Watch the abuse that tries to begin get slapped down instantly, since this ruling stated it is only covering this one particular aspect of the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Sorry, but a corporation is not "just" a group of people.
If a group of people breach a contract, you can sue them and they will have to pay you back from their own assets. If a corporation breaches a contract, you can only touch corporate assets.
If a group of people dump toxins into the environment, they can be personally fined and put in jail. If a corporation dumps toxins into the environment, the corporation pays a fine and the people who initiated the dumping don't get touched.
If a group of people destroy the economy through fraud, they can be fined and put in jail. If a corporation destroys the economy through fraud, it gets a slap on the wrist from the SEC.
The law treats corporations differently from "groups of people" in many respects. One of those respects should be their rights. The underlying people have the same rights as before, but the corporation -- as its own entity -- need not have all the same rights as those people.