Hobby Lobby

First, if you know anything about me, you can guess that I think the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision is bullshit. So good, now that's out of the way.

More and more, I look at Supreme Court decisions like this one -- 5 to 4 with the conservative justice and the 4 ultra-conservative justices on one side, and the four liberal justices on the other side -- as just political votes having little-to-nothing to do with law and everything to do with politics, just like some House subcommittee voting along party lines. Supreme Court decisions that are only backed by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas have lost any sense of legitimacy. Like most politics these days, the solution -- the only solution -- is to get the Republicans out and replace them with Democrats.

Anyone who looks at this decision and thinks that the Affordable Care Act violates the Constitution, so the Supreme Court had to slap it down, is nuts. Five Republicans voted to change the law, and four Democrats voted to leave it alone. That's all.

Here is an interesting quote from the majority opinion:

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.

So what is the legal difference between a religious objection to birth control versus a religious objection to vaccinations? Or even blood transfusions? It seems to me that the justices are saying that religious objections to birth control have a special status, as opposed to say, Jehovah's Witnesses objecting to blood transfusions, which may not be protected because, you know, that's just loony tunes. Only there isn't any good scientific, fact-based, rational reason why refusing to pay for insurance that covers your employees' birth control is any less loony than not wanting to pay for insurance for transfusions. It seems to me that the Supreme Court, or at least five Republicans who seem to care less and less about the Constitution and more and more about politics, decided to favor a particular religious belief with this ruling.

Really quite amazing.

It's funny, as the graphic above indicates, seeing the hypocrisy of Republicans over religion. They understand the problem. They are very aware of the tyranny of  imposing your religious beliefs on another person, as evidenced by the wailing and gnashing of the teeth on their side when they imagine that Sharia Law is taking over America, but they seem totally unaware that imposing Christianity on non-Christian Americans, or on Christians who don't share their particular views, is the same thing.

I have a bad tendency sometimes to think that people who disagree with me, on certain issues that seem obvious to me, are stupid. This is one of those issues.