AdamSmith

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Was Right, and We Already Have Proof Zoë Carpenter on July 2, 2014 - 5:14 PM ET The Nation Among the many questions raised by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is how sweeping its legacy will be. Supporters of the decision have insisted that the ruling is “narrow,” as it explicitly addresses “closely held” corporations objecting to four specific types of birth control—including IUDs and Plan B—because the bussiness’ owners consider them (inaccurately) to cause abortion. Besides, the Court argued, the government can just fill any coverage gaps itself, and it’s only women whom corporations are now permitted to discriminate against. “Our decision in these cases is concerned solely with the contraceptive mandate,” claimed Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority. “Our decision should not be understood to hold that an insurance-coverage mandate must necessarily fall if it conflicts with an employers’ religious beliefs.” Bullshit, is essentially what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to say about the majority’s claim to have issued a limited ruling. In her dissent, Ginsburg deemed it “a decision of startling breadth.” She noted that “‘closely held’ is not synonymous with ‘small’,” citing corporations like Cargill, which employs 140,000 workers. Even more alarming is the majority’s endorsement of the idea that corporations can hold religious beliefs that warrant protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In fact, it only took a day for the Court’s “narrow” decision to start to crack open. On Tuesday, the Court indicated that its ruling applies to for-profit employers who object to all twenty forms of birth control included in the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, not just the four methods at issue in the two cases decided on Monday. In light of its ruling on Hobby Lobby and a related suit, the Supreme Court ordered three appeals courts to reconsider cases in which they had rejected challenges from corporations that object to providing insurance that covers any contraceptive services at all. The plaintiffs in all three cases are Catholics who own businesses in the Midwest, including Michigan-based organic food company Eden Foods. Meanwhile, the High Court declined to review petitions from the government seeking to overturn lower court rulings that upheld religiously based challenges to all preventative services under the mandate. It’s bad enough that the Court privileged the belief that IUDs and emergency contraceptives induce abortion over the scientific evidence that clearly says otherwise. With Tuesday’s orders, the conservative majority has effectively endorsed the idea that religious objections to insurance that covers any form of preventative healthcare for women have merit. This development is not surprising, as it’s the logical extension of the premise that the intangible legal entities we call corporations have religious rights. That’s a ridiculous idea, certainly, but not a narrow one—no matter Alito’s assurance that he intends it to be used only to justify discrimination against women. The cases that must now be reopened aren’t even based on junk science, just general pious resistance to women’s health services. And at least one of those cases is only tenuously about religious freedom. “I don’t care if the federal government is telling me to buy my employees Jack Daniel’s or birth control,” Michael Potter, the founder of Eden Foods told Irin Carmon. “What gives them the right to tell me that I have to do that? That’s my issue, that’s what I object to, and that’s the beginning and end of the story.” As one judge wrote, “Potter’s ‘deeply held religious beliefs’ more resembled a laissez-faire, anti-government screed.” The hole that the Supreme Court tore in the contraceptive mandate can be repaired with a tailored fix, most likely by the Obama administration extending the same accommodation it offered nonprofit religious groups to women working for the closely held for-profit corporations implicated in the Hobby Lobby ruling. Under that work-around, insurance companies themselves—or, in some cases, the federal government—will pick up the tab for female employees’ contraception coverage when their employer opts out. More vexing is the extension of the RFRA to corporations. Business owners now have a new basis for trying to evade anti-discrimination laws and their responsibilities to their employees. Religious liberty is already the rallying cry for conservatives looking for a legal way to discriminate against LGBT Americans; other business owners have tried to use religion to justify opposition to minimum-wage laws and Social Security taxes. Faith groups are already trying to capitalize on the Hobby Lobby decision out of court; on Wednesday, a group of religious leaders asked the Obama administration for an exemption from a forthcoming federal order barring federal contractors from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. According to Alito, courts have no authority to “tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed.” Where, then, are the boundaries? How will courts decide which beliefs are “sincerely held?” Alito asserts that the majority opinion provides “no such shield” for other forms of discrimination, but we have to take his word on it. The language of the ruling may be limited to contraception, but there are no explicit constraints on its underlying logic. http://www.thenation.com/blog/180509/supreme-court-has-already-expanded-its-narrow-hobby-lobby-ruling#

Is an employer who is a Christian Scientist therefore justified in opting out from providing health care coverage because of his religious beliefs? That is one of the points Ginsburg was making in her dissent: that carving out contraception as a special case for religious-precept-based exemption inescapably opens out into broader principles of employment law that were thought to be settled.

Your choice of adverb did not go unremarked.

From Mother Jones. The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg's Dissent on the Hobby Lobby Contraception Decision —By Dana Liebelson | Mon Jun. 30, 2014 11:32 AM EDT On Monday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg penned a blistering dissent to the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling that the government can't require certain employers to provide insurance coverage for methods of birth control and emergency contraception that conflict with their religious beliefs. Ginsburg wrote that her five male colleagues, "in a decision of startling breadth," would allow corporations to opt out of almost any law that they find "incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs." More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision. Hobby Lobby's Hypocrisy: The Company's Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers Why the Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore How Obama Can Make Sure Hobby Lobby's Female Employees Are Covered The Supreme Court Chooses Religion Over Science Hobby Lobby Wasn't About Religious Freedom. It Was About Abortion. Here are seven more key quotes from Ginsburg's dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby: "The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would…deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs access to contraceptive coverage" "Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so of for-profit corporations. Workers who sustain the operations of those corporations commonly are not drawn from one religious community." "Any decision to use contraceptives made by a woman covered under Hobby Lobby's or Conestoga's plan will not be propelled by the Government, it will be the woman's autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults." "It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." "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." "Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be 'perceived as favoring one religion over another,' the very 'risk the [Constitution's] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude." "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield." You can read the full dissent here. (It starts on page 60.) http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/best-lines-hobby-lobby-decision

Barnabas Collins in a Funny Vein tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/search/barnabas+collins+in+a+funny+vein

Well (to further my hijack of my own thread ), I picked my screen name, back when first registering on HooBoy's forum in 2003, based on the thought that I wish the authorities would leave the sex work industry to the invisible hand of the marketplace. Scotch likes me far too well, and I return the favor.

I can only speak to the misappropriation of a certain economist's name.

Interview with Carol Cleveland, the one 'real' woman on the Python shows. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jun/22/carol-cleveland-i-loved-every-minute-of-monty-python

Great meditations by writers, journalists, comedians on their favorite Monty Python sketch, and why. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jun/22/monty-pythons-greatest-skits-best-sketches-o2-shows

So it turns out the great Utilitarian philosopher was an early believer in letting same-sex-attracted people do the dirty in whatever way they wished, without hindrance or sanction. Although he did not dare publish those writings in his lifetime, and they were subsequently, predictably, long suppressed by his editors. Book review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/26/sexual-irregularities-morality-jeremy-bentham-review

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude.

A kind and generous adjective.

Grazie. At 3.2 posts/day average over the past 8-1/2 years, I suppose I put more attention into these forums than anything else except scratching for dollars. Even that! Forgive the self-absorption, but it occurred to look back at a few threads that call up strong memories across the years. Introduction to love of my life; also incidentally the inaugural post by anyone in the Escorts forum, if I recall. (Note that, like many older threads here, the entries are inverted, so that oldest posts are at the end of the thread rather than the beginning.) http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/554-boston-twink-alert/page-2 On handling the dangers of falling in love with one’s escort. (The posts in this one again run from newest on top to oldest at bottom.) http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/680-andre-in-nyc-aug-28-29/ Never-ending poetry post that others nevertheless put up with and even got into the swing of. http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1672-credences-of-summer/ Altogether different poetry post. http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/2782-martha-stewart-likes-big-wieners/ Reunion. http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/2531-two-dinners-with-andre/ Winning Oz’s filthy lucre. http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/3533-congratulations-adamsmith/ How I spent it. http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/3724-three-dinners-with-andre/ Raving about The Web/NYC. Several dancers told me that my post #12 in this thread was apparently TMI for club management, who printed it out, posted it in the dancers’ dressing room, and ripped them up one side and down the other about it. http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/2426-nyc-the-web/ Now (inevitably! ) to Stevens. As a space for reflection, self-presentation, self-constitution, these forums put me in mind sometimes maybe a little bit of this: The Snow Man One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

And furthermore 8 Pronunciation Errors that Made the English Language What It Is Today http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language

To hijack my own thread... Who Ruined English, Brits or Yanks? http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/who-ruined-english-brits-yanks

Interesting linguistic/phonetic musings. http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/25/english-do-syllables-exist-linguists

Bit tedious but worth it for the interest, as well as nostalgia for Clarke and Sagan, if you like this kind of thing. Hawking is hilariously droll at points throughout.