The Hobby Lobby decision: a view from Ireland

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/women-s-rights-central-to-ruling-on-business-owners-religious-beliefs-and-contraception-1.1853118?page=1
The Irish Times
Eamonn McCann
Women’s rights central to ruling on business owners’ religious beliefs and contraception
Opinion: Principle of separation of church and state blurred

(excerpt)
The American Civil Liberties Union described the ruling as “a deeply troubling decision. For the first time, the highest court in the country has said that business owners can use their religious beliefs to deny employees a benefit that they are guaranteed by law.”

While women’s rights are central to the judgment, it may be of greater constitutional significance that the ruling blurs the principle of separation of church and state. If a religious person’s estimation of medical facts are upheld by the state despite being demonstrably wrong as far as science is concerned, where lies the distinction? The obvious US precedent is the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925, in which a high school teacher, John Scopes, was convicted (the decision was later overturned) of violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in state-funded schools. (There was no evidence Scopes had taught evolution: he deliberately incriminated himself so that the issue could be put to the test.)

It is worth noting that the view of Irish law on when a foetus reaches entitlement to the same moral status as a woman is some distance in advance of the position in the US as defined this week. In a 1999 case concerned with a woman’s desire to have embryos created by her and her now-estranged husband implanted in her womb, the Supreme Court declared: “The capacity to be born, or birth, defines the right protected. This situation, the capacity to be born, arises after implantation.”

On this specific and admittedly narrow issue, the Irish courts have shown themselves more liberal and attentive to science than their US counterparts, not, perhaps, because the Irish courts are rushing to embrace the future but because the American courts are sliding back into the past.

MORE at link posted above.