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Hobby Lobby = The Worst

I’ve been writing about it over at Cosmopolitan.com. Here’s the basic summary of the case. Here are 13 of the biggest misconceptions about the case (this one is especially helpful for Twitter / Facebook / family dinner table fights). And, finally, how the right-wing reaction to women with opinions on Hobby Lobby is a pretty good illustration of how this is all about misogyny and hostility toward female sexuality, not religious beliefs.


31 thoughts on Hobby Lobby = The Worst

    1. I was able to get to all the articles by deleting the “preview” off the beginning of the link address (so the url would be “www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/health/hobby-lobby-lies” for example).

  1. I’ve read the decision front to back, and it really truly makes no sense. The McCullen decision – I did not like it in the least, but at least I could read it any understand WHY they did it. This, I cannot wrap my head around.

    The opinion states that they are limiting the ruling only to the question actually presented – namely, contraception. However, there is no language in the actual decision that explains WHY this limitation is reasonable or correct (which Ginsburg actually notes).

    The thing that really scares me is that anyone could basically justify anything under this decision. “For religious reasons” sounds at least somewhat limiting at first, but rember this: SCOTUS defines religion as a“sincere and meaningful” belief which “occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God.” (US v. Seeger).

    So basically, the argument now is that as long as you hold a “sincere and meaningful” belief about, well, basically anything relating to healthcare and what one can and cannot do, you can basically craft your own insurance policies. A lot of people have made hay about Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to cover transfusions, Christian Scientists refusing to cover anything, etc. But think about how broad this gets – can an employer refuse a policy that provides for trans healthcare if they have a “sincere and meaningful” belief that being trans is sinful? How far is this going to go?

    1. I agree completely, Drahill. The logic of the majority opinion does really appear to boil down to nope, and because we said so. There is no legal explanation given whatsoever, which is baffling, because up until recently that was SOP for SCOTUS.

      And I agree completely that this decision has huge logical huge holes through which any religious group could drive their health care denying truck. Yet another thing I can’t get logically get past is the questionable constitutionality of the RFRA itself. It’s a bad law, badly written, with questionable utility, that gives protection to all sorts of bad policy as long as it’s cloaked in religiosity.

      1. Lola, my understand about RFRA is that it was a law that was drafted pretty quickly. The central irony about it is that when it passed, it was almost roundly supported by a lot of left-leaning groups (including the ACLU). RFRA was actually crafted largely to preserve the rights of Native Americans – back in the 90s, there was a spate of Native Americans getting fired from jobs and in legal trouble because of their ritualized use of substances (namely peyote) in religious and/or tribal ceremonies. RFRA was actually framed as a law that was needed to protect especially minority religions from over-broad regulations and laws. However, they wrote it far too broadly and now, as we’re seeing, it can basically be used as a catch-all for any argument that can conceivably be based in “religious belief” (and we know how loose that definition is). RFRA is something that happens too often – a really well-intentioned law that has gotten so twisted it is probably unsalvageable. Thanks, SCOTUS.

        1. I do recall reading about the peyote cases and RFRA being written in response to that line of jurisprudence. It’s a shame that something with such good intentions was done so shoddily. What makes even less sense is that they arguably could have simply passed a law that carved out a narrow exception for NA populations impacted by those cases. I wouldn’t be surprised if the devil in the details was that in order to muster sufficient support for the RFRA they had to broaden it to include all other religions.

          It is a bad law as it’s written. When I went and tracked it down and read the text my main thought was, FFS, this is just so dumb!

    2. @Drahill;

      I recall hearing on the news back in the 70s, that was a man who managed a restaurant and was robbed and stabbed on the way to deposit money in the bank drop. He would have survived with a blood transfusion, but his religion forbid it. And that was just fine with his wife.

    3. can an employer refuse a policy that provides for trans healthcare if they have a “sincere and meaningful” belief that being trans is sinful?

      They don’t even need a reason – many health insurance plans already deny coverage to trans healthcare. Like many things, coverage of trans-related healthcare isn’t mandated by law, so employers/insurers are already free to cover it or not, as they see fit.

      1. My understanding has been that the ACA was partially attempting to address the trans healthcare disparity, particularly through the changes to Medicaid. Medicaid, I believe, is often held as the standard for setting what insurance companies cover and do not. As goes Medicaid, so goes insurance, so it seems. I do think the hope was that the ACA was moving the industry towards providing at least some standard of trans healthcare. However, now, that seems to be up in the air as well, given the new developments.

        However, I may be wrong.

        1. Medicare recently began covering of transition-related surgery (which, as far as I can tell, was unrelated to the ACA). And there’s hope that some of the changes regarding pre-existing conditions and applying non-discrimination laws to health care will help ensure coverage for trans people. But implementation and the exact meaning of those has been very uncertain. There’s no explicit federal requirement for insurance plans to cover transition-related care, unlike the requirements for birth control, and some insurance companies still refuse to cover non-transition care that doesn’t match one’s gender marker.

      1. Not anybody. Christians. Again. Not one of the signatories is identified as a Jewish or Muslim leader. It’s Christians and Christianity, and it’s a Christian college that wants exemptions from covering any form of birth control at all.

  2. Some more reading: Katha Pollitt in The Nation: Where Will the Slippery Slope of ‘Hobby Lobby’ End?

    As Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues in her stirring dissent, there’s “little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood—combined with its other errors in construing RFRA—invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.” The reason it’s unlikely the Supreme Court would uphold a religious exemption for vaccinations or blood transfusions is not something intrinsic to those claims; it’s simply that Alito finds them weird. Birth control is banned by the Bible? Sure. Blood transfusions are banned by the Bible? Don’t be silly. For now. We have no idea, really, how far the Court might be willing to extend RFRA. Could a CEO refuse to pay childbirth costs for unmarried women? Could he pay married men more because that’s what the Lord wants? (Actually, he’s probably already doing that.) But here’s my prediction: the day a religious exemption burdens by so much as a mouse’s whisker the right of men to protect their own bodies from unwanted, well, anything, is the day the Supreme Court Five discover that religion is not so deserving of deference after all.

    via Digby at Hullabaloo

    1. I’d say “the day a religious exemption burdens by so much as a mouse’s whisker the right of [white, cis, heterosexual, at-least-nominally-Christian] men to protect their own bodies from unwanted, well, anything, is the day the Supreme Court Five discover that religion is not so deserving of deference after all.”

  3. The irony is that Hobby Lobby, the nominal winner of the case, hasn’t actually won anything. They won’t save money, because as is widely known, restricting contraceptive coverage actually raises costs. They don’t get to enjoy practicing their deeply held beliefs because, as their past and their current business practices show, they don’t likely have any of those beliefs.

    The only winners in this case are the people like the Kochs who want to sow strife and discord among the 99%, and they will be reaping it in abundance.

    1. They’ve won a lot. They’ve confirmed corporate personhood and created a major exemption from laws for practitioners of mainstream religion. They may not have won anything economic, but they certainly have scored a major win for the right wing, and as with most corporations, I’m sure those “beliefs”–insofar as a corporation has the capacity to believe, which it doesn’t–are quite sincerely held.

      1. EG, “mainstream” doesn’t even come into it – it’s worse. To me, this decision reads as though SCOTUS doesn’t recall its own precedent. The Seeger decision established that a “religious belief” doesn’t need to even implicate any sort of god, theology or even morality. For example, we are actually already seeing this play out. Do you know that there is currently a case winding its way through the courts in which a woman who declined vaccination was able to successfully argue that her veganism occupies a place in her life that is basically equal to religion and thus, mandating she do something “non-vegan” is a form of religious discrimination? How will that play out after this decision? Can your boss, if they are vegan, refuse to cover any medication that contains animal-derived ingredients or any procedure that was tested on animals? When you couple Hobby Lobby with the precedents from cases like Seeger, I’d argue yes.

        If this decision applied only to mainstream religions, it would still be bad, but it would at least have a limited scope (albeit a large one). But this….this is so immense it could have almost real limitless potential (and possibly reverberate through the courts for decades, at least) – and that is what makes it so, so frightening.

        1. Honestly, though, I strongly suspect that in practice, practitioners of mainstream religions–by which I mean most versions of Christianity–will be able to take fullest advantage of these rulings. I just don’t see Islam, say, or Wicca, getting the same kind of deference.

          In general, though, I’m in favor of de-centering religious belief from its privileged place–why should somebody’s Catholicism be due so much more deference than my father’s Marxism? Certainly my atheism doesn’t mean that my moral and ethical principles are any less strongly held by me than Hobby Lobby’s owners’ “principles”–such as they are–are held by them. More so, I daresay.

        2. EG, I suspect that scenario would depend greatly upon the judge, would it not? A judge already declared veganism to be a viable religion for discrimination purposes, so what makes you think more cases such as that are not in the near future?

        3. Well, because I don’t have much faith in the objectivity of the US legal system, particularly when it comes to religious belief. Some, i.e. Christianity, have always been more equal than others.

          Personally, I don’t think that there should be vaccination exemptions for anything other than medical reasons, but if we let people opt out for religious reasons, why shouldn’t vegans also have their beliefs respected?

        4. EG, personally, I’m not sure I agree with you, simply because your argument would be far more persuasive if there were a body of actual jurisprudence that supported your theory, but there doesn’t seem to be. The body of jurisprudence that extends from SCOTUS decisions like the Seeger decision were actually attempts to enshrine protections for anything that could conceivably qualify as “religion.”

          And isn’t your second point what I’ve been saying? SCOTUS effectively DOES extend religious protection to non-theistic ethical systems in the Seeger decision – if you read my above comments, you would have seen that. My argument is that coupling precedents like Seeger with the Hobby Lobby decision will effectively create a religioys exemption of unlimited scope with no ability to limit it, and that will effectively render any insurance mandates moot. My argument was that if your argument was true – and this decision is limited solely to “mainstream” religions (which you seem to define as Abrahamic) that would on some level be at least somewhat more hopeful, since it would at least provide SOME limitations, whereas the actual decision itself, when you take it in light of precedent, is so limitless its frightening.

        5. Drahill, I understand your point. I just disagree with it.

          I’d find it a lot more convincing if you could find a legal example of a non-Christian (By “mainstream,” I do not mean “Abrahamic”; I mean Christian) being allowed to inflict zir beliefs on others. The example of the vegan you cite involves her ability to live her beliefs on her own body, and despite the theoretical possibilities, I have yet to hear of a scientologist pharmacist citing conscience clauses to justify refusing to fill a prescription for anti-depressants. I have yet to hear of a vegan employer refusing to cover vaccines or insulin in zir health insurance offerings. It’s Christians who do these things; it’s Christians who take them to court; it’s Christians whose beliefs are legally inflicted on the rest of us.

          And it’s Christianity that I find most threatening, so no, I don’t think it’s more frightening that theoretically vegans and Marxists and what-have-you could do the same. I consider that to be the logically consistent result of allowing these “religious” exemptions for Christians in the first place. Indeed, the scrap of hope I see is that with the broadening of the category, more people will see how bad these exemptions are.

          Much as I deplore veganism and scientology and so on, it’s Christian groups that want an exemption from equal opportunity employment regulations for LGBTQ people. I’m sure that white supremecists would also like exemptions from eoe regulations for people of color as well, but given that white supremacists are almost always Christians as well, I’m not sure that they need to expansion to do their damage. Christianity is the threat, and I would not be more reassured or less threatened if such rules were to be limited to Christianity, because the reality is that they will be.

  4. I’ve yet to hear an answer from someone supporting the Hobby Lobby case on what to do about women who need these drugs for reasons other than preventing pregnancy.

    No other type of drug with multiple uses is prohibited because it “might” be used for a purpose someone’s religion doesn’t permit. Nobody is prohibiting opiates because they might be used in euthanasia. Nobody prohibits Depo Lupron because it might be used in chemical castration.

    Doctors offer prescriptions expressly to prevent misuse of medicines: that’s why medical discussions should be between a woman and her doctor. It is interesting that these religions step in only when women’s reproductive rights are involved, but not human rights or male reproductive rights.

    1. They’ll get the at no cost just like the Hobby Lobby employees. All that needs to happen is for the regulatory accommodation for non-profit corporations that currently qualify for an exemption under ACA be extended to for-profit corporations. That can happen without an act of Congress.

      Essentially what happens is the insurer will pay for contraception and deduct whatever that cost is from the fees they pay the federal government for being listed on the exchange. If a company is self-insured, then then third party administrator pays and deducts the cost from the fees they pay the federal government.

      Effectively what this case does is require the federal government pay for health care mandates that require employers to violate religious beliefs. Provided the Obama administration extends the accommodation to for-profit companies, there will be no impact on access to contraception.

      1. Bullshit. Did you not see the follow-up case, in which Wheaton College argued that filling out the paperwork that would allow that to happen is also a violation of their “religious beliefs”? And the Supreme Court found in their favor?

        So now religious employers can block their employees from getting contraception that they, the employers are neither paying for nor facilitating in any way, just by deciding not to fill out a form. There is every impact on access to contraception.

  5. Hi Jill,

    (Hope I’m neither getting buried and missed here after a couple days of comments, nor misguided in trying to “contact” you here!)

    I’ve been a reader of your work for at least a couple years now — congrats on the new Cosmo gig! But I’m having trouble “following” all your latest content! :-/ O:-) You obviously used to blog here a bit more frequently, even linking to your stuff on other sites (The Guardian, etc.), and I could mostly easily keep up with that on my RSS reader. But even if you’re pretty much only writing for Cosmo these days (which still may not be the case), not only does their site not seem to have a useful RSS feed that I can find, I can’t even really click on your byline or anything to go to a reverse-chronological list of your articles to peruse the old-fashioned way (like here!). Admittedly, I’m still not on the Twitter machine myself, though I most recently sifted through your timeline on the web to find a bunch of your recent stuff I’d been missing (not that I don’t also find the non-you stuff you RT and link to interesting). Not that all this should be exclusively your burden, per se, but surely I can’t be the only person seeking to easily “RSS” you, to keep up with all your great writing! 🙂 Any ideas (or even a good person at Cosmo to “suggestion box” this to)? Thanks so much, keep up the awesome work, all the best to you!

    Mark

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