Whew, quite a refute Perhaps you missed my earlier post, where I did in fact say that I was against the courts' decision. For, in fact, most of the reasons you mentioned here. You make some very solid points, Seroim, but nonetheless I have to disagree with some...
I often argue just for argumentation's sake. Sometimes I argue with people who fully agree with me, in case one of us can bring additional arguments that one of us hadn't thought about. Please don't think I'm trying to come off as brash or overly aggressive, that isn't my intention. I just like arguing for the intellectual stimulation it provides.
I hardly think that's a fair claim to make in light of the decision. The court understood what it did and by no means has religion suddenly become a get-out-of-jail free card. Hobby Lobby was a bit different - you can hardly consider a private, family owned and operated business to be on the same level as GM.
That the court understood exactly what it was doing is what is so scary with this ruling. Scalia is a hardcore religious fundamentalist and he leads a band of cronies on the Court that are two fingers away from being simple yes-men. Alito's ruling was definitely influenced by Scalia's radical ideas, if you read between the lines, and why wouldn't it be? They are ideological allies. And yes, in essence, religion has become a get out of trouble free card in the States. Maybe not every jail, and not in every situation, but enough to make the situation unacceptable and unfair to everyone else.
What freedoms exactly are being suppressed by the ruling? The employees' freedom-of-their-right-to-a-specific-part-of-their-medical-coverage is being taken away? So that would mean all employees are entitled to this coverage against their employer's will. And that becomes a separate argument altogether. What should be on that ever-growing list of things that employees are entitled to from their employers? Personally, I think IUDs should be on that list - again, I was against the ruling - but that's a far weaker basis than "The government is forcing our company to pay for even more stuff that we don't want or need to pay for, AND it's just straight up wrong to us." That sounds a lot more like a suppression of freedom to me.
Well, the first right/freedom to be taken away, and a fundamental one that is at the base of any Western democracy, is our right to all be equal under the law, as I've explained in my other post.
There are really only two cotisations that should be asked of the employer in regards to their employees : an union contribution due to the Rand formula and a contribution into the national pension plan, both equal to the employee's share. But as long as Americans decide to beat around the bush and institute this "universal health care but not really" nonsense, comprehensive health coverage should definitely be on the list. The ACA gave rise to the right of every American to hold health care insurance that is as uniform as possible. That's another right gone.
It also affects the putative rights to privacy and bodily integrity as given the circumstances where Hobby Lobby pays peanuts and the vast majority of working class American households are cribbled with debts, it gets to decide what goes into an employee's body and what doesn't. I honestly wouldn't whine nearly as much if HL employees had the potential means to get the Plan B themselves, but this stuff is really expensive and 7,25$ an hour doesn't go very far these days.
And of course, the right of women not to be discriminated against because of their sex. Why are vasectomies covered but not IUDs or Plan B?
Discriminating against things they don't like? Or not supporting things they think are wrong? If they ruled the other way, they would be forced to support things they think are wrong. And then you could use the exact same hierarchy-of-human-rights argument in reverse. See how it goes both ways? Again, it isn't so much freedom of religion here, or that religion holds higher precedence over other human rights. Because it doesn't. But the freedoms that would've been violated if the ruling was not in favor of Hobby Lobby would be higher in number and a lot less vague.
You misunderstand. The crux of the argument is that the Supreme Court has shown that basically, they don't give a crap about what the complainant thinks about right and wrong. It's impossible to claim that you don't support x, you think it's morally wrong and you don't want to pay for it when you're receiving money from the company that produces x via dividends, some indirectly coming from the sale of that very x. It's also illogical to have religion butt with science regarding what is a scientific fact (that emergency contraceptives and IUDs do not cause abortions) and have religion win unscathed just because the complainant thinks that science is wrong. All the courts care about is if the belief can be construed as religious, and if it is "sincere" (which criteria they don't seem to put much stock in.)
This is why this ruling has elevated freedom of religion so high above every other right, because it is impossible to attack the religious belief directly since it was made ironclad by the courts, and on the reverse, the burden of proof to prove religious exercise is laughably low. You can always make the argument that AR-15s aren't covered by the Second Amendment, that being in a friend's car invalidates your right to privacy, but you cannot attack any religious belief, ever. They do not have to be reasonable or even logically possible, everything under the sun is protected and burdening the exercice of even the most extreme belief requires the government to submit itself to strict scrutiny, which is extremely strict indeed (in Canada, the courts struck down our equivalent of strict scrutiny as applied to religion because it was too harsh a criteria, just to put it in context for you). Religion is this society's last golden calf.
We are allowing a fundie Christian to discriminate against women openly. I do not see what's so vague about that, and I'm pretty sure there are more female employees than there are David Greens at Hobby Lobby. I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments (or fallacies) usually, but the question is valid in this case : what's next, now that the courts have opened to door to every complaint about nearly any law, save tax laws, on a religious basis? What other law will be bent next for the benefit of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Pastafarians? As I said, the facts in this case aren't the problem, it's the whole philosophy underlining it.
That's plainly ridiculous. It's 2014, religion is on the decline (maybe not as much in the US but certainly here in Europe), and the US has never once been a theocracy. A bunch of retarded evangelicals that believe a 2000 year old explanation of everything is still accurate are not going to take over the world.
It is not so ridiculous, though.
Evangelical Christians represent a quarter of the total US population, they reproduce more than average, they are a completely monolithic voting block and they are policitized to the extreme. If religion was such a passé thing, there would not even be a debate on teaching creationism in public schools, nor a debate on mandatory school prayer, and the ridiculous assertion that "America is a Christian nation" that is disproved by reading more than 2 pages of the Federalist Papers would not exist.
I'm not saying they are taking over the world, but they are on their way to strangling the US into submission.
I'm sorry, but that's plainly impossible. I can give you about 4.5 shitzillion examples of communism catastrophically failing, time and time again throughout history, with evidence so clear and obvious it's almost comical. When the government tries its hand in doing other things that are distinctly not governing, it majorly sucks at it. It's not even a question.
We do not really know as all attempts to introduce communism were either horribly misguided or fraught with outside intervention. In fact, communism has existed in nature : primitive communism in our old hunter-gatherer societies. All that's left to do is legibly translate it to today's context.