Last edited Mon Apr 27, 2015, 09:33 PM - Edit history (1)

the RW Justices I mean. Dangerous, dangerous Court of ideologically twisted and corrupt clowns. Dangerous times are afoot because of the never ending RW Judicial attacks upon personal freedoms, racially, socially, gender and sexual orientation.

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religious beliefs of the employer outweigh those of the employee? This is just so screwed up that an employer has so much control over a woman's choices for reproductive care.

These assholes have such big blinders ...

What happens when a business owned by some other religion uses these kinds of rulings to object to provisions that they want?

can of worms closed up.

This obviously only applies to Christian objections and I'm sure this court will uphold this standard if they are asked to. It doesn't matter what the Constitutions really says, the law is whatever the Supreme Court says it is.

this is what would happen, and yeah, the just go whatever way they want ...

Just saying ...

It grants one class of citizens with special powers and privileges the legal authority to control other citizens who must relinquish their rights and meekly submit to someone else's religious beliefs. It will spread. Now they are setting up controls for women that they failed to achieve by the legislative process, but what's next? First a store decides they won't sell groceries to women with children born out of wedlock, then a movie theater bans non-Christians, next the diner won't serve unmarried couples, because that too, chaps their hide.

Like a malignancy, there's no stopping the steady slog toward theocracy.

The appeals court here ruled that the contraceptive mandate, with the accommodation for religious nonprofits that the Obama Administration devised, did not substantially burden the religious exercise of the challengers. The Hobby Lobby ruling, which came afterward, was fairly permissive in its approach to what counts as a substantial burden. So effectively the Supreme Court is saying, "Now that we've clarified that, go back and try again." It doesn't dictate the outcome of the case, or even of this particular question in the case.

So does that mean I can refuse my employees to cover cancer treatments because it is 'God's Will' based on my company's religious principles?

if the belief comes from another religion the Supreme Court is free to rule that unconstitutional.
The law is what they say it is, not what is written in the Constitution.

insurance to their employees under the SCOTUS ruling then.

but not far fetched for these 'Christians.'

England and other countries because we were tired of following the rules of religion?

Votes are not released on orders.

and sent this back to the Circuit Court. I had to dig through SCOTUSBlog to get an idea of what actually happened since the Reuters report is useless (at least what they filed so far). The issue itself is not dead yet and can still be litigated.

....to keep fighting over this. How many SCOTUS justices are Catholic? SIX. That's 6 out of 9, people. I suspect they want enough diversity of opinion in the lower courts in order to set up a major case brought to them so that they can decide once and for all, for all of the country. When lower courts collide on issues with appeals courts, that's when cases usually end up at the SCOTUS. And most of them in recent years are business-related cases.

They're allowing Christian Sharia law, little by little. We aren't even marching towards theocracy. We're running towards it.

They are ordering the 6th circuit to reconsider their decision in light of the Hobby Lobby decision. When the SC makes an order like that the 6th circuit will reverse their earlier decision.

Per the bolded paragraph in my quote. And they had another choice as taken from the SCOTUSBlog excerpt):

That will end the case. They did not take up the MI case because the matter has already been decided. They only take about 50 cases a year. They did not want to waste their time writing up a case when the 6th circuit could do it. If you call that punting then so be it.

The Sixth Circuit will decide the case again. It is free to come to any conclusion, though it is bound by Hobby Lobby as a precedent (as it wasn't previously, because Hobby Lobby hadn't been decided at the time). When the Sixth Circuit rules, the losing party can ask the Supreme Court to take up the case, and it might do so. But this action in itself doesn't resolve the case.

check how many times it comes up with a decision against the SC precedent. About zero. Judges, even lifetime ones, don't like to be reversed.

(that's the University of Texas affirmative action case), the case went back to the same panel, which reached exactly the same result. And that was after full hearing, too; it wasn't just a summary disposition like this one.

It happens all the time. A grant, vacate, remand order like this one isn't a statement that the Supreme Court disagrees with a lower court ruling. It's just a statement that the Court thinks an intervening Supreme Court decision impacts the issues the lower court ruled on.

They didn't even try to understand federal civil procedure.

because of lack of birth control. And their upbringing through college. They should want to.
But they also probably fire women when they get pregnant especially if they aren't married.

Therefore, I claim the 1st Amendment right to help myself to anything I damn well please.

but there is a very important argument that was essentially punted in the Hobby Lobby case. Providing insurance, baking wedding cakes, taking photographs are not the exercise of religion, even if the person engaged in these activities holds sincere religious beliefs. The RFRA did not expand the definition of religious activity beyond what is protected in the 1st Amendment. In Hobby Lobby, everyone got obsessed with the juicier question about corporations as "persons" under the 1st Amendment and virtually conceded that a religious individual could not be forced to provide full-coverage insurance. Not only did this doom the Hobby Lobby case before a court that is VERY pro-corporation, it opened the door to the obscene "religious liberty" legislation and rhetoric that we see and hear now. Handled properly, this remand could, from a practical standpoint, eviscerate Hobby Lobby and the anti-gay, anti-choice, legislation that has followed. There is maybe a glimmer here that we should not overlook.

That's not controversial; it's been well-established (if you count Free Exercise cases from before RFRA's passage) for decades.

on the basis of your religious beliefs is just that is just that your beliefs. Your deciding what they should believe. In essence its promoting a state sponsor religious viewpoint. It using religious doctrine.

The problem with these challenges to the contraceptive mandate is that they don't pay enough attention to the impact on the employees. It's not their definition of religious exercise, which is standard. What you do to live and act in accordance with your religious beliefs is religious exercise.

to be religiously-motivated conduct, the conduct must, as per Reynolds, be dictated by religious beliefs. This is where we get back to the concept of "legitimate" claims of the free exercise of religion. Religions still don't have the last word on what does, or does not fall within the parameters of religious activity. If they did, every civil or criminal statute proscribing any activity could be forced to survive strict scrutiny simply upon the word of some religious leader.

If you mean to suggest that RFRA only kicks in for particular practices that are religious obligations strictly speaking, that's not true. (RFRA's definition of religious exercise includes "any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.&quot It would make no difference here, in any case, since the challengers do think they're religiously obligated not to facilitate the contraceptive mandate. (Whether they in fact do facilitate the contraceptive mandate is a different question, and the answer might be "no"--that just goes to whether the requirement actually substantially burdens their religious exercise, though.)

If you mean to suggest that RFRA only applies to some pre-existing category of "religious activity" that is defined without reference to any particular person's religious beliefs, that is simply not the case. The requirement is only subjective: the person must have a sincere religious motive for the conduct. It need not be what some other person would regard as "religious."

Your point about breadth is well-taken but would better be directed at the Congress that enacted RFRA. (In fairness, the way courts handle this problem, both under RFRA and under the old Free Exercise standard that RFRA sought to reestablish, is that they apply a very lenient version of "strict scrutiny.&quot

but I'll give it one more try. In Hobby Lobby, the corporate entity [was held by the Court] to hold a sincere religious belief that life begins at conception. We will take that fiction as true. What was treated as a given (by both sides) is that this belief bears any relationship to providing health insurance. Put colloquially, it was as if nobody stopped to question the statement, "Well of course you can't provide health insurance that includes contraceptive coverage if you believe that life begins at conception." I would submit that the connection is as tenuous as the now-infamous statement, "Well of course you can't bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding if you believe that God has prohibited gay weddings." Providing health insurance is not providing contraception any more than baking a cake is "participating" in a gay wedding. The "belief" in question is not whether contraception and/or gay marriage is wrong, but rather whether providing insurance and/or baking a cake is actually "participating" in either event. Where I see a failing in the original litigation was that Burwell did not force Hobby Lobby to demonstrate a sincere religious belief that providing insurance was the same as providing contraception. The making of that connection, I would suggest, is neither religious, nor sincere. In any event, thank you for the discussion.

Glad you're here! It sure did open up a can of worms. Just like SCOTUS's Citizens United ruling. I wonder if, years from now, maybe even one or two of 'em on the bad side of these rulings will wake up and realize just what they've done, the genie-from-Hell that they unleashed, the Pandora's Box they opened. I get cold comfort from sandra day o'connor, who YEARS LATER, after having ruled for bush in bush v Gore, FINALLY came around to realizing that - "um, well, er, uh, yeah, guess maybe that was a bad ruling... we kinda shouldn't have done that..." Too little too late, lady. Thanks for NOTHING.

after bitchin about the same issue, come to find out about their investment portfolios including corporations that mfg different types of birth control?

Maybe someone needs to investigate the Michigan Catholic Conference and see if they have
any mutual funds which reveals the same type of hypocrisy..

that covered abortion and/or contraception. They didn't object until the ACA came out. Their hypocrisy is mindboggling.

Why should I have to pay for drones and such?

but when they start thumping their bullshit, I object

but when they descent, they are not "the final authority". Funny how that works. When they found in favor of Hobby Lobby all the Christians said Amen, the court is awesome! Now, with marriage equality? should the court make it legal, they have already declared it is the anti-christ. Assholes.

Providing healthcare coverage should be taken out of the hands of employers and made part of a Medicare for all system.

Healthcare coverage is a "benefit" offered in lieu of salary. "Salary" should not be subject to an employer's belief system. It is something that is earned, not given. No employer should have the right to dictate how an employee spends salary.

Your employer shouldn't pay for your birth control.

He shouldn't have anything to do with your healthcare at all.

Then why can't the anti-birth control ones lose business also?

We need to inform people who these are.

There is so much damn ignorance about the birth control mandate. I have heard people who I THOUGHT were smart saying "Why should I pay for someone's birth control so they can screw around?" in defense of Hobby Lobby. And no amount of logic got through. No logic about legitimate medical reasons for BCPs, no amount of logic regarding who is really paying for it, and no amount of logic regarding imposing one's beliefs on an employee. Nothing got through. They're like anti-vaxxers.

It's much easier to hate on teh gheys - you don't have to understand them to hate them.

Last edited Mon Apr 27, 2015, 10:31 PM - Edit history (1)