SCOTUS Decisions on Hobby Lobby and Massachusetts Buffer Zones

I just wish their astonishing ignorance and hypocracy regarding women's bodies hadn't driven them to this.

FIXED. Their beliefs are short sighted, discriminatory and conflicting with themselves.

fangblackbone wrote:
I just wish their astonishing ignorance and hypocracy regarding women's bodies hadn't driven them to this.

FIXED. Their beliefs are short sighted, discriminatory and conflicting with themselves.

The women are still choosing to work there. I bet if they could only find male employees they would change their policy pretty quick.

LeapingGnome wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:
I just wish their astonishing ignorance and hypocracy regarding women's bodies hadn't driven them to this.

FIXED. Their beliefs are short sighted, discriminatory and conflicting with themselves.

The women are still choosing to work there. I bet if they could only find male employees they would change their policy pretty quick.

A. Many of those male employees still have wives and female dependants.

B. Ignoring that for your hypothetical, if they had only male employees, this would mever have come up.

C. Haven't we already debunked (for lack of a better word) the idea that anyone can just walk away from a job (much less one that is $14 an hour) when we have plenty of unemployment?

I am really disgusted the SCOTUS could make this decision. It's a massive can of worms and they had to have seen that.

Demosthenes wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:
I just wish their astonishing ignorance and hypocracy regarding women's bodies hadn't driven them to this.

FIXED. Their beliefs are short sighted, discriminatory and conflicting with themselves.

The women are still choosing to work there. I bet if they could only find male employees they would change their policy pretty quick.

A. Many of those male employees still have wives and female dependants.

B. Ignoring that for your hypothetical, if they had only male employees, this would mever have come up.

C. Haven't we already debunked (for lack of a better word) the idea that anyone can just walk away from a job (much less one that is $14 an hour) when we have plenty of unemployment?

I agree, I am just saying women do have power in this situation if they wanted to exercise it as a group.

Shoal07 wrote:

I am really disgusted the SCOTUS could make this decision. It's a massive can of worms and they had to have seen that.

I think they knew. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that when Roberts was the swing vote in the mandate ruling, he knew something like this was coming.

LeapingGnome wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:
I just wish their astonishing ignorance and hypocracy regarding women's bodies hadn't driven them to this.

FIXED. Their beliefs are short sighted, discriminatory and conflicting with themselves.

The women are still choosing to work there. I bet if they could only find male employees they would change their policy pretty quick.

A. Many of those male employees still have wives and female dependants.

B. Ignoring that for your hypothetical, if they had only male employees, this would mever have come up.

C. Haven't we already debunked (for lack of a better word) the idea that anyone can just walk away from a job (much less one that is $14 an hour) when we have plenty of unemployment?

I agree, I am just saying women do have power in this situation if they wanted to exercise it as a group.

Ummm... except making a stand against your employer when your job can affect so much of your life is not always feasible.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I agree, I am just saying women do have power in this situation if they wanted to exercise it as a group.

Unfortunately, striking workers in "right-to-work" states don't tend to benefit as much as one might like.

DSGamer wrote:

I think they knew. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that when Roberts was the swing vote in the mandate ruling, he knew something like this was coming.

Every man wants a legacy.

Kehama wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

I think they knew. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that when Roberts was the swing vote in the mandate ruling, he knew something like this was coming.

Every man wants a legacy.

His legacy will be that Democrats cheered when he sided with the mandate while behind the scenes he was ready to bring to the Supreme Court cases that would not only utterly decimate the ACA, but would also entrench corporations as having near limitless power.

Dahlia Lithwick co-authored a good piece on Slate on how the Roberts court disguises its conservatism.

Under the stewardship of its boyish chief justice, John Roberts, the court has taken the law for a sharp turn to the ideological right, while at the same time masterfully concealing it. Virtually every empirical study confirms this rightward turn. Yet recent public opinion polls indicate Americans continue to see a bench that is, if anything, a wee bit too liberal.

How to explain the justices shoving the law rightward, while everyone thinks it is dead center or too far left? The answer is that Roberts is a brilliant magician. He and his four fellow conservative justices have worked some classic illusionist tricks to distract us from seeing the truth. Roberts is likely the first chief justice to understand that the message matters as much as the outcome. He has played his role with consummate skill, allowing the law to shape-shift before our very eyes, even as he and his fellow conservatives claim that nothing is happening.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/VxA3Geo.jpg)

Roberts is likely the first chief justice to understand that the message matters as much as the outcome.

Eugh. As much as I know that this is just a fact of our reality, it still spins me off into the rage zone whenever I see it exploited.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

Roberts is likely the first chief justice to understand that the message matters as much as the outcome.

That article is from 2010....

This is also the first time in history where the message matters as much as (or close to) the outcome. Admittedly, I'm not sure if the court created that particular problem due to the way it has handled certain (partisan) cases in the past 20 years or had the problem forced onto them by the media, bloggers, the general public, etc.

Well. (Sorry for the over-the-top-headline, but I decided that I want to try to trace things back to the original linked source instead of just linking to where I first noticed the story.)

Wingnut Nurse Sues Family Planning Center For Not Giving Her Job Just Because She Says She Won’t Do Job
(original Kaili Joy Gray, Wonkette, 2014-07-18; found via Jezebel)

and on the flip side:

Obama Signs Executive Order On Federal LGBT Workplace Discrimination; No Religious Exemptions in Sight
(Audrey, Autostraddle, 2014-07-21)

President Barack Obama signed an executive order this morning that prohibits discrimination against LGBT employees and potential hires by any company that receives a federal contract. Today’s move affects about 20% of the nation’s workforce — some 28 million people work for companies with government contracts, and over half of those work for companies or in states without such protections. The Labor Department will carry out the order, which will probably go into effect early next year.

Obama also signed an executive order that prohibits federal employers from discriminating based on gender identity. That order applies as of today. Obama did not include exemptions for religious groups in either order, despite heavy pressure to do so from evangelical leaders.

This is going to be one heck of a fight.

Wingnut Nurse Sues Family Planning Center For Not Giving Her Job Just Because She Says She Won’t Do Job

So... unwilling to give birth control... but wants a job where one of her primary responsibilities would be giving birth control... she she's volunteering to take a job where... nope... can't even think this one out.

Demosthenes wrote:
Wingnut Nurse Sues Family Planning Center For Not Giving Her Job Just Because She Says She Won’t Do Job

So... unwilling to give birth control... but wants a job where one of her primary responsibilities would be giving birth control... she she's volunteering to take a job where... nope... can't even think this one out.

I would have assumed this was a standard tactic for the anti-Planned Parenthood nuts - if they can get a discrimination lawsuit to stick, they could do a lot of damage financially...and now that religious exemptions can be used to avoid having to follow the law, I suspect we'll see more of this.

Cod wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
Wingnut Nurse Sues Family Planning Center For Not Giving Her Job Just Because She Says She Won’t Do Job

So... unwilling to give birth control... but wants a job where one of her primary responsibilities would be giving birth control... she she's volunteering to take a job where... nope... can't even think this one out.

I would have assumed this was a standard tactic for the anti-Planned Parenthood nuts - if they can get a discrimination lawsuit to stick, they could do a lot of damage financially...and now that religious exemptions can be used to avoid having to follow the law, I suspect we'll see more of this.

Actually I don't think it has anything to do with the Hobby Lobby case, and from what I can tell it's not the usual sort of discrimination case. It seems there are already laws in place laws that specifically protect people who have an objection to participating in certain medical procedures from 'discrimination'. If you search for the phrase "right of conscience" you'll get a whole bunch of links. These laws seem to exist both at the Federal level and the state level. Here's what I was able to find about the Federal law in an article from 2011:

After two years of struggling to balance the rights of patients against the beliefs of health-care workers, the Obama administration on Friday finally rescinded most of a federal regulation designed to protect those who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds.

The decision guts one of President George W. Bush's most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.

...

The new rule leaves intact only long-standing "conscience" protections for doctors and nurses who do not want to perform abortions or sterilizations. It also retains the process for allowing health workers whose rights are violated to file complaints.

Calling the Bush-era rule "unclear and potentially overbroad in scope," the new, much narrower version eliminates language that had triggered alarm among reproductive health advocates, women's groups, stem cell scientists and proponents of honoring end-life-life wishes of terminally ill patients.

Cod wrote:

I would have assumed this was a standard tactic for the anti-Planned Parenthood nuts - if they can get a discrimination lawsuit to stick, they could do a lot of damage financially...and now that religious exemptions can be used to avoid having to follow the law, I suspect we'll see more of this.

I have the sneaking suspicion that the lawsuit is exactly that. She's asking for $400,000 in damages and that just happens to about the same amount of money the chain of clinics gets from the HHS every year. She also wants all federal funds denied until the clinic fixes it's "discrimination" problem.

This is where the war on women idea really comes into play. The clinics in question service 70,000+ people every year, 83% of which are below the poverty level. Florida needs clinics like this because they're one of the few boneheaded states that refused to expand Medicaid, meaning there's a boatload of single mothers and children who *need* its services.

This lawsuit would either effectively bankrupt the clinic or force it to hire people who were simply incapable of providing adequate healthcare to an extremely vulnerable population. Either way it's a conservative "victory" that is supremely damaging to thousands and thousands of women, which is doubly hypocritical because those conservatives are supposed to actually care about people's lives.

Satanists to the rescue:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/2...

Edit: Their spokesperson is Lucien Greaves. He better twirl a badass mustache.

NathanialG wrote:

Satanists to the rescue:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/2...

Edit: Their spokesperson is Lucien Greaves. He better twirl a badass mustache.

How crazy is it when Satanists have perfectly reasonable responses to things?

Countdown to #notallreligions has started...

Reaper81 wrote:

How crazy is it when Satanists have perfectly reasonable responses to things?

AFAIK, the church is actually kind of a joke, an invented thing to jerk on Christian chains.

It's interesting how hard it is to overcome the culturally-imprinted horror of the very idea, innit?

NathanialG wrote:

Satanists to the rescue:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/2...

Edit: Their spokesperson is Lucien Greaves. He better twirl a badass mustache.

The premise is flawed, so what they are saying is that in states where informed consent is the law (or whatever the phrasing was) they would refuse to pay for abortions as well, only paying for them in states that don't mandate that. Which they could probably get away with under the ruling.

The "narrow" Hobby Lobby decision has just been used by a U.S. District Court Judge to find that a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) doesn't have to comply with a federal subpoena because naming church leaders would violate his religious freedom.

Never heard of the FLDS before? That's because they're a 10,000 strong splinter group of the Mormon church who left because they *really* didn't want to give up polygamy. Their current "prophet" is currently in jail because he was convicted of sexually assaulting two underage girls--the youngest of which was 12.

The feds are trying to bust the FLDS on child labor violations. The brother of the "prophet" allegedly ordered all of the FLDS schools to be closed for a week and the children shipped to a private ranch to harvest pecans (for free, of coure). I don't know why I said allegedly when you can just watch the video of the kids working here.

That's f*cked up, and sadly not entirely surprising. Though the fact that this exemption has been used in something as widely different from the Hobby Lobby ruling as this is very worrying. I guess I really need to join or start a religion to ensure that I have all the rights available in this country.

The "narrow" Hobby Lobby decision has just been used by a U.S. District Court Judge to find that a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) doesn't have to comply with a federal subpoena because naming church leaders would violate his religious freedom.

So much for render unto Caesar. I find this interesting though, as I could have sworn 5th Amendment limited the "will not testify against" list to like yourself and a spouse (maybe children/parents?).

The FLDS are best known for their polygamy, but they are, all around, a cancer who have codified child sex abuse and are big fans of welfare fraud (they have a lot of "single" mothers who collect checks), and while I guess it's not a by-the-book legal crime to dump truckloads of exiled teenage boys in nearby urban areas to free up teen brides for the old men (which obviously increases the teen homeless population in said areas), it's definitely a sort of crime. You all are smart enough to have already reached this conclusion, but this is confirmation that you are not unreasonable for thinking this is essentially claiming a religious exemption to protect gang leaders.

Remember when conservatives talked about gay marriage opening the doors to plural marriage?

DSGamer wrote:

Remember when conservatives talked about gay marriage opening the doors to plural marriage?

DSGamer wrote:

Remember when conservatives talked about gay marriage opening the backdoors to plural marriage?

FTFY.

I suspect it was more polyamory they were worried about.

Evangelicals have always hated the Mormons.