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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.
Further, Hobby Lobby still provides coverage for more than a dozen kinds of birth control. Just not the ones that can induce abortion of an already fertilized fetus.
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.
My religion says that killing is wrong. Can I refuse to pay the percentage of taxes which goes to the military?
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!
Chick-fil-A were attacked because they were openly bigoted.
Were there any documented cases of Chic-Fil-A refusing to serve someone because they were gay? Refusing to hire someone because they were gay? Attacking someone because they were gay?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
We had it before the ACA's mandate. 85% of group health plans provided it. Non-profits in all 50 States and many local governments make it available to those who can't afford it. The cost is not prohibitive even for those without insurance who don't wish to avail themselves of the aforementioned options.
You're assuming all birth control methods are created equal. They aren't.
The pill is a comparatively poor method in terms of success rate (roughly 9%/year failure rate and needs to be taken religiously every day) compared to more recent methods, such as IUDs (0.2-0.8% failure rate, depending on type. Basically foolproof as they're insert-and-forget for 3+ years) and implants (0.05% (this is actually better than the success rate for tubal ligation), insert-and-forget for 4 years).
The mandate expanded the state of things from "Oh, you're poor, so you get the failure-prone pill because it's cheap" to "Take your pick of any method, they're all covered", which is a good thing. Saddling people who can least afford a child with the most failure-prone method for preventing that is a recipe for disaster.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
As a follower of THOR, the God of Thunder, I have been forced to operate my business in a manner which directly contradicts my faith. Government mandated building codes have forced me to maintain so-called safe electrical wiring so that my employees don't get electrocuted. I sincerely believe that this is merely a way for the faithless cowards to avoid Thor's judgment. You see, if you die of electrocution, it means that you have offended the Thunderer and have been righteously smitten by his divine will.
Thor asks little of us, save that we provide an offering of mead to him at each meal. Yet most of my foolish employees would deny him even this small request. That I'm forced to provide buildings which shield these wicked individuals with safe, modern, electrical wiring is a troubling incursion upon my religious freedoms as a business owner. I feared that if I continued to follow the Government's secular laws, that I would be denied access to Valhalla.
Thanks to the Supreme Court's wise decision today, Obama and all of the witless cretins in my employ shall soon feel the wrath of Thor's mighty hammer, Mjolnir!
Praise be to Thor!
I don't see these same scientists doing research to prevent the high number of fertilized eggs that fail to implant (so called self-abortions). These are all unique "organisms" according to this philosophy. If birth control causes fertilized eggs to pass through, and they naturally do this quite often, then we should rush to research how to prevent all of these natural abortions, right?
Instead, you see nothing about this. That's because they don't give a ... about the fertilized eggs at all.
Yes yes, No True Catholic.
If you started expunging all the insufficiently devout Catholics, there probably wouldn't be much left of the church when you were done.
Though that may not be a bad thing.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
A blade of grass is a distinct organism. Would you then never walk on a lawn?
A single sperm or egg has DNA, regardless of fertilization. Those sperm have relatively equal potential, too, but too bad for them that last little bit of motion by the coupling partners that made sperm number 43,235,22 win the race. Are you a mass murderer for those sperm that don't meet and proceed to spawn a new organism? Of course not. It's not about DNA.
And further, the question isn't, or at least should not be, about "life." That's just too simplistic to be useful unless you're quite insane. Moss is alive. Bacteria are alive. Etc, ad infinitum. What are you going to do, off yourself so you can't interfere with any of them?
The question is, and or at least definitely should be, are you doing harm to something that can suffer? here's the key issue: Does it have a nervous system, and does that nervous system couple to something sophisticated enough to convert those signals into suffering?
Just think about it. The question's really not that difficult, and you don't have to invoke either the hucksterism of philosophy or the juju of religion to resolve it cleanly and ethically.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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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No, you've made the same stupid leap the religious lobbisits want you to make.
Ah.
No doubt you would be fully in favor of laws to force Muslim employers to provide bacon to their employees as long as the majority votes that way. Or maybe a Supreme Court mandate in favor of forcing Jewish businesses to be open on Shabbat, or forcing Jewish restaurants to serve meat with dairy. I don't support any of these either, and those scenarios make just as much (non)sense as forcing employers to pay for employee contraception or abortion in violation of their conscience.
You have failed to establish a compelling rationale for why employers' beliefs need to be suppressed simply in order to provide birth control to people. Unlike many other aspects of politics, this is an artificial point of contention because these two positions are orthogonal in any rational scenario. In order for you to make a compelling argument in support of suppressing religious rights in this regard, you have to establish a rational basis for why these positions (i.e. availability of contraception and employer religious beliefs) are logically in tension.
You have fallen into the trap of believing that there are only two alternatives in this debate (suppressing religious beliefs or suppressing access to contraception). You are too blinded by your political agenda to realize you are defending the party line on a pointless wedge issue rather than advocating for a real solution: ending the employer-provided health insurance paradigm in this country.
Again... the idea that corporations can have religion is absurd.
Corporations are groups of people getting together under a charter. Many corporations are based in religion and conscience. Many for profit corporations have elements of religion and conscience. Non profits are generally incorporated as well.
It's funny. Progressives complain that corporations only worship profit, and then when they act on other values, they demand they only worship profit.