The Glade 4.0

Churches are a business. The priesthood is second only to prostitution as ancient professions go.

As for Hobby Lobby, as I said to Kaffis last night, anybody that is uncomfortable with the notion that they are funding another person's abortion shouldn't be paying people. Now, since it's hard to get employees without paying them, that bodes ill for their long term survival as a company.

There is a very fine distinction between the role of an employer and the role of a slave master. This is heavily ingrained upon our society and written in to our legal code to the point where we are no longer capable of acknowledging it. That itself is part of the problem. Hobby Lobby's religious freedom is not the only set of freedoms that matter in this case. The religious freedom of every one of their employees matters, too. The Supreme Court has ruled that employers may use their economic position to extort employees into following the owner's religious beliefs. Period.

The argument that the employees could find work elsewhere if they don't like it doesn't hold water. The reality is that a cashier or stocker for Hobby Lobby is not a chemist for Pfizer or a supervisor for General Motors. Their freedom to leave is severely limited. Hobby Lobby knows this.

Workplace laws do not exist to protect Shuyung from discrimination or mistreatment. His skillset and value to his employer protects him just fine. These laws exist to protect the disposable wage slaves.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Last I checked nearly all people with employer-based health plans pay for some or all of their premiums (and the premiums were covering 100% of the contraceptive costs). Why is their dime less important than their employer's?

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

It's not really a matter of how much money you make. If you work for a Catholic hospital, your health insurance doesn't cover any kind of contraceptives or abortion, regardless of whether you're a doctor or a janitor. The doctor can probably pay for this stuff out of his own pocket, but the various mid-level medical professionals that work there definitely have valuable skills that don't save them from not being able to get something like a tubal ligation, which they're very unlikely to be able to afford out of pocket.

It became the employer's business the very second they were mandated to be a party to those procedures.

You can't have it both ways.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

All 4 prescriptions in question prevent pregnancy by preventing ovulation and fertilization through various mechanisms.

Plan B and Ella, specifically, don't appear to affect implantation - they prevent ovulation and thicken cervical mucus. They don't appear to prevent pregnancy if a woman has ovulated. IUDs are supposed to create an environment that is toxic to sperm (e.g., copper ions), and can also delay ovulation & thicken cervical mucus, also preventing fertilization.


Journal article on effect of Plan B pre- and post-fertilization: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20399948

Journal article on effects of IUDs on fertilized embryos (vs. spontaneous abortions): http://www.popcouncil.org/uploads/pdfs/Sivin.pdf

Media articles summarizing the data on Plan B and Ella:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02 ... tudies-say
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/healt ... d=all&_r=0

Description of IUD mechanism: http://center4research.org/medical-care ... g-the-iud/

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

The majority opinion made the same point, but I think it's being disingenuous, since there's apparently nothing in the reasoning of the opinion that limits it to the facts of this case.** Sure, other forms of birth control, pre-natal care for unwed mothers, blood transfusions, AIDS medication, psychiatric treatment, invasive surgery, etc. weren't at issue in this case, so those fact patterns weren't adjudicated, but that doesn't mean the logic of the opinion isn't applicable. As Scalia himself correctly noted in Lawrence, the Court can say whatever it likes in dicta, but if there's no limiting principle in the reasoning underlying the holding, that reasoning will undoubtedly get cited and used in subsequent cases to expand the scope of the original ruling.

Of course, in practice, we have 5 Catholics on the Court, not 5 Christian Scientists, and our political discourse considers abortion to be an issue on which reasonable people can disagree whereas banning blood transfusions is viewed as crazy-town, so we're not likely to get rulings in favor of many of those other things. Ironically, that actually turns the intent of both the Free Exercise clause and RFRA on its head: widely-held beliefs with significant political support get more protection from the courts than the unpopular minority beliefs that the First Amendment and RFRA were designed to protect.

** This analysis is based solely on the coverage I've read from SCOTUSblog and Volokh Conspiracy, as I haven't read the opinion itself yet.

RangerDave:

Ginsberg makes the same argument in her dissent; unfortunately, she doesn't have enough case law to justify her dissent. The Court reached the only legally viable conclusion in this case and based on this case's facts. If we are worried about what a just finding's precedent will do, then we've already lost sight of why our Justice system is retroactively cognizant in the first place.

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Aye, I don't disagree. I'm actually on board with the result in this case, and I'm even inclined to support similar rulings in at least some of the various "parade of horribles" scenarios I mentioned. I just think it's a bit hand-wavy to deny that the parade is likely on its way to the courthouse now.

These cases were already on their way to the Supreme Court. When you issue a mandate that effectively turns an entire private market service industry into a government mandated and hyper regulated HMO, you're going to get these cases. It's not hand-waving to point out that this case does not open any new doors.

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All excellent decisions, though I cringe at the practical implications of the abortion clinic ruling. You put two impassioned people on opposite sides of such an issue in close proximity and there will eventually be violence.

Bottom line, it sounds like abortion clinics simply need to find better locations. Having a door open onto a public street is a bad idea. They need a private parking lot where people can get onto private property safely.

One of the common responses to the hobby lobby case that i keep hearing is "conservatives need to **** off and leave my uterus alone".

I don't get it. Do you really feel oppressed that your employer is not forced to pay for your medication? How is it "leaving you alone" to pay for your medication?

"I don't want my tax dollars going to _____________"

To me that sounds crazy. "If we do the right thing we might have to fix a bunch more mistakes in the future to fix existing wrong so lets not even correct existing ones." is not a good position to hold.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

There's no reason why this should be the case. This is essentially saying that people with religious values must not engage in commerce in a manner consistent with those beliefs if it inconveniences someone else. This is an enormous de facto restriction on religious freedom, and completely unacceptable in a free society. Freedom of Religion is not a tool for atheists and nonbelievers to imose their beliefs, no matter how much they might dislike the beliefs of others. This sort of catch-22 is exactly the sort of thing the Constitution is there to prevent; a paper respect for rights while at the same time imposing substantial burdens under the guise of protecting someone else.



Not period. Wrong.

The court ruled that the government did not use the least-invasive means to provide funding for the products in question.

Furthermore, the religious freedom of the employees is utterly irrelevant. The guarantee of freedom of religion is a guarantee against government interference with your religion; it is not a freedom from the consequences of your beliefs and someone else's beliefs interacting in a way inconvenient for you, nor is it a tool to coerce others into acting in ways contrary to their beliefs because those beliefs might be unfavorable to you in some way. It is ESPECIALLY not a guarantee of that when the government has a means to accomplish the same thing by a less-invasive method.



This argument has "held water" just fine on this board right up to the point that someone used it for religious reasons. Hobby Lobby clerks do not need to be able to find jobs as supervisors or highly-skilled chemists or anything equivalent to have other comparable employment opportunities. There are innumerable businesses that employ people doing substantially the same work as a Hobby Lobby employee does; their inability to get jobs that command MUCH higher wages and require MUCH more skill is irrelevant.

Furthermore, Hobby Lobby is not a store for staple goods; they're a store for nonessential specialty items. As such, they are not normally found in heavily rural or remote areas. Those areas with very limited sales work have things like dollar stores and wal-marts and other basics, not Hobby Lobbys, which are found, at a minimum, in semi-urbanized areas.

Finally, their "Freedom to Leave" in the sense of limited other opportunities is not Hobby Lobby's problem. Hobby Lobby is not beholden to its employee's every desire just because they might have trouble finding another job. It's amusing how the anti-gummint sentiment switches into liberal sympathy for the poor downtrodden employee as soon as it's a religious matter.



1) Not getting a few highly particularized types of abortificant birth control is neither discrimination, nor mistreatment, especially in view of the complete lack of options for males to absolve themselves of responsibility in the same way.
2) The decision pointed out that there is a way for these employees to still gain access to these products without Hobby Lobby or the employee having to pay for them.
3) The government "tax" for noncompliance was truly outrageous, at $475 million a year.
4) This is exactly the sort of argument used in favor of minimum wage laws, and it's equally nonsense there.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Which isn't happening.

You're the one who doesn't believe in something that should really be pretty obvious to everyone, but doesn't want to becuase it might impact his fun.

See? I can state my beleifs as established fact too!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Religion isn't getting "special treatment" any more than speech and assembly and the press are. Atheism gets the same protections as religion anyhow. Thats what people don't seem to get - atheism is religion, and gets the same legal protections. The problem with athesits is they want it to be a religion to get protected, but be "Not a religion" to get atheist beliefs treated as a default of some sort.

Furthermore, very, very few companies would make that argument, and they couldn't justify it based on this decision anyhow. The decision was based on the RFRA, not the 1st amendment, and as such referenced the "least invasive means" requirement - a major element of the decision was the fact that the government has another means of making sure employees get access to these products without burdening either them or hobby lobby. It's very silly to think that many companies would care about only hiring Christians; publicly-traded companies could never make the argument of religious conviction, and others would be faced with the problem of determining who is and isn't a Christian for no real reason.

A major element of most religions is mission work; JWs come around to people's houses all the time. If anything, they'd WANT to hire outside so as to prostelytize.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This decision is incredibly narrow, and relies heavily on the fact that the government could just extend the rules for nonprofits to for-profit, closely held corporations to allow women to get access to these particular contraceptives. It noted that some states are already going to a hybrid model for some charities because nonprofit does not work for every charity.

This method (which is in the decision if anyone other than me and Khross and you is inclined to actually read it) allows them to obtain it at no burden to themselves ro to Hobby Lobby; essentially the cost is passed to the insurer under the justification that it's cheaper than the alternative of NOT having it.

This case, at its core, is about making the government accomplish a public good (and access to contraceptives IS a public good) in the way that intrudes the least on people's freedoms. That isn't hard to udnerstand if anyone actually bothers to read it, but I suspect the real butt-hurt is just being mad that the "neanderthals" aren't being forced to foot the bill. The actual impact on the employees is zero.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Again, indicating those people have not read the case. Furthermore, their uteruses need to **** off and leave Hobby Lobby alone, and while they're at it they can **** off and leave the paychecks of men they can choose to garnish at will alone. There is no argument whatsoever for women's reproductive health to be "left alone" without MAJOR reform of child support laws and alimony.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

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Holy shitsnacks!

Please go **** yourself.

Yeah, why read the rulings when we can just jump to conclusions?!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Khross did not have to respond to my comment. Nor did he have to give me condescending ****. He got the response he deserved.

Given our history, both you and Khross, why respond to me? Leave me the **** alone, and I'll do you the same favor. Clear enough?

Or you could get your head out of your ***. You know either one.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

What a surprise..... tiny dick #3 to the rescue.

Sam:

That's not condescending; that's asking you to do your due diligence before you jump in a fact-based conversation.

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