Yesterday, when America’s
Supreme Court once again decided 5-to-4, this time in favor of Hobby
Lobby/Conestoga Wood, they asserted that the religious beliefs of the owners of
private corporations trump the individual beliefs and rights of their
employees. This decision does much more than deprive women of insurance coverage
for certain kinds of contraception. It gives seriously discomfiting credence to
the ridiculous notion that corporations are people and that the rights of
corporate persons are greater than the rights of human persons – which is
pretty much how things have been going in all areas for some time.
So the Court ended its
session with yet another attempt to further a Conservative Christian agenda,
redefine personhood, set a dangerous precedent, and create genuine confusion
about what is legal, let alone Constitutional. It’s no wonder that Justice
Bader Ginsberg in her dissent said, “The court, I fear, has ventured into a
minefield.”
I’m so angry about this
latest SCOTUS bullshit that I am literally physically, emotionally, and
mentally drained. And the thought that I’m morally obliged to help fight this
is thoroughly overwhelming – in large part because I don’t understand it.
According to the research
I’ve done, the Constitution, in the First and Fourteenth Amendments, makes
clear the necessity for a separation of Church and State, even though that
specific language isn’t used. But it doesn’t address a unification of Church and
Commerce. So what in the Constitution
makes it legal for the owners of a private company to determine what kinds of
health insurance coverage they will or won’t provide to their employees, not
based on cost or law, but on the company’s owners religious beliefs?
Hobby Lobby is a very big
company, which is what makes it a corporation. It has thousands of employees in
hundreds of stores across the country. This is not a new business, so employees
had health insurance in the past. Apparently, it’s the provisions of
Obamacare-governed insurance that added types of contraception – such as the
Morning After pill and IUDs, methods that can induce abortion – that the deeply
anti-abortion Green family (the owners) object to and therefore don’t want to include or pay for (they don’t object to
other forms of birth control, such as the pill or diaphragms, which they are
willing to pay for – thank you, Green family…).
Let’s say, for the sake of
argument, that corporations are
people. Why do they have rights that human people don’t have? For example, I
have Medicare and pay over $100 a month for it. Medicare covers many things
that I will never need, such as medications, treatments, and surgeries that
only apply to men. Medicare doesn’t cover dental care or eye glasses or hearing
aids – all of which I do need.
Yet I can’t say “I don’t
want to pay for men’s stuff, I want my
Medicare payments to cover what I
need.” If the Green family gets to cherry pick the coverage they will and won’t
cover – not just for themselves but for thousands of other people – based on
what they believe, why can’t I do the
same, just for myself, based on what I actually need?
It would be bad enough if
it stopped there. But as Justice Bader Ginsberg also pointed out, “Would the
exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood
transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists);
medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and
pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and
vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision.”
This, my friends, is what’s known as a truly
slippery slope. All of America, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.
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