Hobby Lobby decision
Hobby Lobby won its anti-contraception case. Depressing. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the conservative Catholic majority on the court. An article about the decision from The New Yorker ...
A Very Bad Ruling on Hobby Lobby
[...] What other companies can ignore which other laws on what real or dreamed-up religious grounds? That is something the majority decision in Hobby Lobby leaves shockingly undefined. Ginsburg called it “a decision of startling breadth,” one that could allow for-profit corporations to “opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Alito, in his opinion, denies this; so does Anthony Kennedy, in a concurrence. But neither does so persuasively: their reassurance about the protections against what Ginsburg calls “the havoc the Court’s judgment can introduce” come down to, in Alito’s case, shrugs about how nothing alarming has shown up on the Court’s docket yet and, in Kennedy’s, the belief that everyone will be sensible about this. But if there hasn’t been a wave of cases there also hasn’t been a precedent like this—and now there is. And good sense has never been much of a reliable restraint. This suggests that the majority is either being disingenuous about how broad its ruling is or is blind to its own logic. As Ginsburg notes, religious objections to, say, vaccines are neither as theoretical nor as easily put aside as the majority pretends.
Nor is science much of a constraint. Hobby Lobby is really asserting two religious beliefs: that abortion is immoral and that the kinds of contraception it doesn’t want to pay for are, in fact, a form of abortion, even though the scientific evidence says they are not. The majority defers to both of these beliefs ...
And from Marci A. Hamilton, the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University .... What’s Really Wrong With the Decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Burwell?
And the editorial in The New York Times ... Limiting Rights: Imposing Religion on Workers
And from Brian McLaren: Q: What Did Hobby Lobby Win? A: Many More Abortions
And from the LA Times: Hobby Lobby and the Court conglate contraception with abortion ... The craziest thing about the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision
And at NCR ... Hobby Lobby: Political Hypocrisy
A Very Bad Ruling on Hobby Lobby
[...] What other companies can ignore which other laws on what real or dreamed-up religious grounds? That is something the majority decision in Hobby Lobby leaves shockingly undefined. Ginsburg called it “a decision of startling breadth,” one that could allow for-profit corporations to “opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Alito, in his opinion, denies this; so does Anthony Kennedy, in a concurrence. But neither does so persuasively: their reassurance about the protections against what Ginsburg calls “the havoc the Court’s judgment can introduce” come down to, in Alito’s case, shrugs about how nothing alarming has shown up on the Court’s docket yet and, in Kennedy’s, the belief that everyone will be sensible about this. But if there hasn’t been a wave of cases there also hasn’t been a precedent like this—and now there is. And good sense has never been much of a reliable restraint. This suggests that the majority is either being disingenuous about how broad its ruling is or is blind to its own logic. As Ginsburg notes, religious objections to, say, vaccines are neither as theoretical nor as easily put aside as the majority pretends.
Nor is science much of a constraint. Hobby Lobby is really asserting two religious beliefs: that abortion is immoral and that the kinds of contraception it doesn’t want to pay for are, in fact, a form of abortion, even though the scientific evidence says they are not. The majority defers to both of these beliefs ...
And from Marci A. Hamilton, the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University .... What’s Really Wrong With the Decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Burwell?
And the editorial in The New York Times ... Limiting Rights: Imposing Religion on Workers
And from Brian McLaren: Q: What Did Hobby Lobby Win? A: Many More Abortions
And from the LA Times: Hobby Lobby and the Court conglate contraception with abortion ... The craziest thing about the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision
And at NCR ... Hobby Lobby: Political Hypocrisy
posted by crystal | 12:49 PM
3 Comments:
Hi Crystal – Thanks for the links, which I am going to read later today.
Since you love truth as much as I do, perhaps a few links to another point of view on this ruling might be helpful since the Truth lies somewhere in the middle:
http://blog.archny.org/steppingout/?p=3201
http://blog.adw.org/2014/06/ok-we-won-but-the-hobby-lobby-vote-should-have-been-9-0-wake-up-america-your-liberty-is-on-the-line/
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/
http://www.mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/
Henry
P.S. I am reading your other posts too and will try to post some comments later
Hi Henry,
OK, I read them. I think our feelings about this issue are so far apart that reading what the other side has to say is not going to help. The articles that you mentioned took for granted that certain things are true ...
1) that our religious liberty is in peril
2) that many contraceptives are abortifacients
3) that there's something inherently Christian about being against contraception
... but I don't believe those things are true. I don't see how we can have a meeting of the minds when our basic ideas about the subject are so different. But I still like you :)
Actually that last blog you mentioned inspired me to add another link, one about how the court and hobby lobby conflate contraception with abortion :)
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