Little Sisters of the Poor Set To (Mostly) Lose Next Court Round

The Little Sisters of the Poor gamboling chuckling in front of the Supreme Court - waving banners and signs to push their anti-ACA birth control case.

The Little Sisters of the Poor, waving their assorted images of a faux saint and former pope, as well as signs reading 'Help a Sister Out', are nothing if not circus conscious. They sincerely believe with every fiber of their 'holier than thou' chanting and parading that they will sway the 4-4 deadlocked Supreme Court to deliver a ruling in their favor on the bogus "religious liberty" case before it.

All I can say is 'good luck'. The sobering reality is that given Scalia's absence and no intent on the part of repukes to replace him, the Court will split along ideological lines and end up in a 4-4 tie. That means the existing appeals court 'wrokarounds' will be left for them to deal with - which may be for a year or more depending on how long it takes for Mitch McConnell and his fellow Reeptards to approve a SC nominee. It may well be over a year.

In the meantime, the lower court rulings will find the Obamacare contraceptive alternative (for religious institutions) operating in most of the nation (43 states), while a swatch of seven states in the Midwest (under the jurisdiction of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis) will allow exemptions, having found that the  workaround is "insufficient" under the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act"

Let us recall that contraception is among a range of preventive services that must be provided at no extra charge under the ACA health care law. The administration pointed to research showing that the high cost of some methods of contraception discourages women from using them. A very effective means of birth control, the intrauterine device, can cost up to $1,000.

Houses of worship and other religious institutions whose primary purpose is to spread the faith are exempt from the birth control requirement. Other faith-affiliated groups that oppose some or all contraception have to tell the government or their insurers that they object.

In 2014, the justices divided 5-4, with Scalia in the majority, to allow some "closely held" businesses with religious objections to refuse to pay for contraceptives for women. That case involved the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores and other companies that said their rights were being violated under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As one  editorial (Dallas Morning News. March 31, 2014) framed it:

 “the deep-seated personal convictions of  Hobby Lobby’s executive and Conestoga’s Mennonite owners are not in question. What is at issue is whether a private, profit-making business can dictate religious beliefs on employees.”

In other words, the SC affirmative verdict  de facto  and incomprehensibly extended the religious rights of individuals to corporations that are legal artifacts – not persons – and exhibit no explicit religious missions!

Moreover, as I noted before, legal artifacts – whether corporations, municipalities, counties or states do not have rights!  Only flesh and blood people can have rights – as per Prof. Garry Wills famous assertion ( 'A Necessary Evil: A History Of American Distrust Of Government', Simon & Schuster, 1999, observes, p. 108). Thus,  those legal artifacts, including states – retain prerogatives which are artificial not natural - since they are things made by contract.  Thus:

Governments and legal entities  have prerogatives, people have rights

The five Justices who found for Hobby Lobby essentially  torched over 200 years of how rights are defined, and instead conflated prerogatives of a contractual, legal entity with personal rights. The result was a legal atrocity that Citizens United paled beside. The egregious decision also opened a ‘Pandora’s box’ allowing corporations – businesses to pell mell deny employees a host of other previously assumed benefits or rights. As the Obama Administration has persuasively argued:
 

“The owners of Hobby Lobby aren’t entitled to exemption for their business based on their individual religious beliefs”

Or, as the Philadelphia-based federal appeals court pithily put it:

“Businesses do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously motivated actions.”

 

 Apart from this, the Little Sisters' argument that their religious convictions and rights are being violated by providing contraception for SECULAR employees is totally bogus. If indeed, they’re all about preventing SECULAR employees – say atheists like me – from accessing artificial  birth control- then they are indeed imposing their faith.  Besides - what if the tables were turned? How would Catholic purists and dogmatists react if a Hindu-run corporation took over a Catholic Hospital? Would such a happenstance be called a "forced conversion" or  "violation of religious liberty"? OR - would it be considered a business transaction only? Also, if the newly merged entity produced subsidiary corporations - what religious principles would rightly apply? Catholic blowhards need to think such questions through before they get all sanctimonious on us.

 If instead the nuns and their eager beaver defenders confined their natural law moralism to Catholic employees only, there’d be no objection. “Imposing one’s faith” means taking away rights of secular citizens– based on invoking one’s own imagined religious principles.  In other words, extrapolating their “principles” beyond their proper moral domain to take away the rights of citizens who aren’t part of that domain other than in an employee capacity.

 

While we’re at it, let’s take a closer look at these principles which they profess to hold so dear. Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty  has asked ('The Lessons of Zoology'. in Contraception and Holiness, p. 110):

"Why do we call secondary the ends of the sexual act which have been accorded in fullness to us, and why do we call primary the end which we share with the lower animals?"

Prof. Daugherty is referring to the fact that the core of Pius XI's  original encyclical Casti Connubii was that the "sin" of artificial contraception inhered in making primary a sexual aspect that in reality is only "secondary". According to that pontiff:

"Since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature."

Which is irredeemable codswallop. As Daugherty notes in her chapter (op. cit.)  what the pontiff and his ilk really sought to do is reduce humans to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. In this sense, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations. They aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times. As Daugherty notes (pp. 96- 97):

"After ovulation, all mammalian females are under the influence of progesterone from the corpus luteum. This is a period of rapidly declining estrogenic activity which ends the sexual receptivity of the lower mammalian female, whether or not fertilization occurs. 

But (in humans) marital relations continue during this progesterone -dominated period before the abrupt onset of menstruation. It is the period of lowest estrogenic activity and the progesterone-dominated period after ovulation which are known as the 'safe period' for marital relations."

 

This then, is what the Catholics'  “rhythm method” (of  Ogino-Kaus)  seeks to do: establish the "safe period" for a particular woman and then ordain that this is the time to safely have sexual relations if one wishes to not have any kids. The trouble is, it requires meticulous temperature taking at various times during a cycle to establish where that safe period begins and ends, and often this will be for no more than 10 days or so in a given month. Presumably, the couple is quite happy to do without sex the other two thirds of the time! 

Thus, the moralizers of the Vatican are actually demanding that married couples act UNNATURALLY, since as Daugherty observes (ibid.):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age"

Julian Pleasants has observed (op. cit., p. 88) the Vatican  has always been hostage to:

 

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."
 

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.)So why be surprised  now when the same Church - including the Little Sisters-  seek to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?  

 

It seems to me the Little Sisters desperately need education from a fellow nun - who actually inhabits the 21st century as opposed to the late Middle Ages. I refer to Sister Margaret Farley (of Yale Divinity School) who's already schooled the Vatican's ossified, anti-sexual relics in a practical sexual ethics that nearly all normal, non-psychotic people would be able to live by. This she did in her (2006) book, Just Love.  

Evidently, this daring and insightful book only got onto the Vatican's radar screen later, after it had taken issue with American nuns standing for reason (and especially the Obama Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - including the revised contraception aspects).

It's needed now more than ever as we learned (in yesterday's WSJ) that if the Church doesn't alter its birth control stance the gulf between what it teaches and what its people actually do will widen - already nearing the point of a breach.

I strongly advise the Little Sisters to read it, one at a time, or maybe have someone read it out line by line.

Women Have The Right To Stand Up To Oppressive Religions!

                                                                             

Author and atheist Sam Harris hits it spot on in his masterful book, 'The Moral Landscape' (p. 63):

"Because religions conceive of morality as being obedient to the word of God (generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward), their precepts often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in the world. Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality etc. without ever feeling obliged to argue these practices actually cause suffering. 

They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm."

Examples reflecting the last points exist in abundance, such as the RCs' excommunication of  an American nun (in Arizona)  for saving a 27 year old mother’s life at the expense of her fetus’. Her moral choice was either to let the birth occur and see both mother and infant die, or prevent the birth (because of the mother’s blood pressure complications) and save the mother.

The Vatican's distorted morality (the same that forbids artificial contraception as "mutual masturbation") demanded that both mother and infant perish rather than allow the lesser of the beings (the fetus, not yet a fully formed person) die to save the more advanced being.  But  this is exactly what Harris meant when he referred to the "pious uncoupling of moral concern from human suffering".

To her credit, the nun chose the higher morality not dependent on simple obedience to an archaic God-concept. Realizing both lives couldn't be saved she chose to save the mother's.

In a similar way, another courageous woman - Brittany Maynard - realized that she already had a death sentence from brain cancer, but she had the power to circumvent it having the "last word". Thus, Brittany chose to end her life as a still sentient being rather than descend into a totally vegetative state lacking any life quality - with excruciating pain to go with it. Hence, Brittany's choice to end her life manifested a greater morality .  This morality rejected the suffering of merely existing in a debased vegetative condition based on the specious presumption  of "sanctity of life" demanded indiscriminately for any and all conditions.

Examining Brittany's choice one can see in retrospect that it was highly moral while the religionists attacking her exuded a morality that was "flagrantly immoral" because it extended human suffering.

These are extreme examples, to be sure, but lesser examples can also be invoked to show that women have the power (and right) to exercise their own choices - say in the matter of artificial contraception or abortion.

Thus, a Catholic woman with four kids already may understand that another would incur enormous hardship because of lack of resources. She is therefore totally justified in rejecting the Catholic Church's proscriptions against birth control.

Likewise, a single woman given a ''roofie"  in a drink by some low class renegade, and who later gets pregnant, is fully justified in getting an abortion. Her pregnancy occurred against her will, not her choice, so she is not obligated to endure the biological suffering and hardship a nine-month pregnancy will induce. 

Other single women, who may work in Catholic institutions (schools, hospitals),  have the right to demand FREE contraception as specified under the Affordable Care Act.  The argument that the institutions' "religious liberty" requires that no contraception be a part of any health plan is nonsense. This also extended to the Hobby Lobby fracas, irrespective of the decoupled SC decision.

As the Obama Administration has persuasively argued:

“The owners of Hobby Lobby aren’t entitled to exemption for their business based on their individual religious beliefs”

Or, as the Philadelphia-based federal appeals court pithily put it:

“Businesses do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously motivated actions.”

It is also important to note the Court has never recognized a for profit corporation's "religious rights" under federal law or the Constitution. 

As far as the Catholics' claim, it is also detached from reality- since workers at Catholic institutions are under no obligations to adhere to Catholic dogmas.

The bottom line is that once women - of all faiths or none- see that religions' moral precepts have nothing to do with maximizing well -being in the world, they will be charged to act under their own consciences. This is their right and it trumps any "pelvic proscriptions" the religions may have on offer!

Conservo Supremes Defecate on the Country With Their 'Hobby Lobby' Decision

Supporters of the 5 Supreme Court Justices'  Hobby Lobby ruling cheer from the peanut gallery of a D.C. zoo. That's exactly where these five "justices"  belong!

I never thought it would come to this, that five alleged top Justices of the Supreme Court would actually defecate on the Constitution and settled federal law but alas, they have.  As most tuned-in U.S. citizens would have learned by now, the Supreme Court in a confounding and insane decision,  have asserted that corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women. This applies specifically to the Plan B and Ella drugs (as well as intrauterine devices)  that have been hysterically described by the plaintiffs (Hobby Lobby et al) at abortifacents.

Of course this is abject ideologically-driven bullshit that one would have thought the five conservo Justices would have had enough intellect to parse. But evidently not!  The insipid claims are not at all based upon medically based ideas about abortion, but on recycled Foxian Hogwash. As Dr. Petra Casey, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Mayo Clinic, told the New York Times in a recent piece on the science behind emergency contraception:

"These medications are there to prevent or delay ovulation. They don’t act after fertilization."

As the Times  went on to note, emergency contraception like Plan B, Ella and the hormonal IUD do not work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb. Instead, these methods of birth control delay ovulation or thicken cervical mucus to prevent sperm from reaching the egg, meaning that fertilization never even occurs.

But the five SC conservos who have deemed corporations, "persons" - were too fucking dumb or ignorant to process that. Maybe they need to remove their black robes and go back to high school to take a course in basic human biology, the reproductive aspect.  Here's more basic biology from Dr. Anne Davis on the difference:

"An important distinction here is that fertilization is not the same thing as pregnancy for the very, very simple reason that these things take time. There are a lot of steps between fertilization and implantation being successful. For the average woman who is not on any kind of birth control, that process of fertilization is occurring over and over and over again and those women are not getting pregnant over and over and over again because many of those fertilizations never, ever implant.

There are all these things that have to happen for pregnancy to occur. I think if people think about the question of when a woman is pregnant, the answer seems pretty intuitive. When I go to somebody and ask, “How many times have you been pregnant?” I’m not asking, “How many times have you had fertilized eggs?”

So now, because of basic biological ignorance, we're saddled with a court decision for corporations that's as daft as it is incompetent.

And we won't even get into the colossal LEGAL ignorance and deliberate flouting of more than 200 years of settled federal and constitutional law that NEVER, EVER before recognized a corporation as a religious being!  Don't these five,  dumbass mutts grasp what the hell they have done here? Do they not comprehend the consequences?

Here's some further perspective: As David H. Gans recently noted at Slate, “Not one Fortune 500 company filed a brief in the case. Apart from a few isolated briefs from companies just like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the U.S. business community offered no support for the claim that secular, for-profit corporations are persons that can exercise religion.”

Further, polls on public opinion consistently show most Americans (up to 70%) believe Hobby Lobby and its deluded cohort are way out of line. To the point of being detached from reality.

But what about the consequences now? Given the five c-turds have ruled that corporations can have "sincerely held religious beliefs", this ruling effectively validates the kind of discrimination conservative lawmakers in Arizona tried to pass earlier this year with SB 1062 the law of the land.  As Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress wrote earlier this year:

"Denying birth control to your workers because of your own religious objections to it superimposes your own personal beliefs about conscience and faith onto your employees. So does refusing to serve a gay person due to a religious objection to their sexual orientation”

Or a black man  is denied service because a fundie fervently believes (according to his pet Bible) that the black man is numbered among the "Sons of Ham" so must be  served with a life of hardship, humiliation and denial.

Frankly, this decision put forth by the five conservo justices amounts to a legalistic defecation on the settled law of the land.  These five clowns have now shown they’re not only incompetent and irrational but have no respect for the rights of the majority of citizens in the country. It also means the Obama administration must search for a different way of providing free contraception to women who are covered under the objecting companies’ health insurance plans. (A Yale law prof interviewed this afternoon on 'The Cycle' believes such a solution might be feasible)

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion , ought to have been ”borked” from SC nomination when considered back in 2005.  But we know ten pussy-wussy Dems balked, and decided not to reject this repuke punk out of "bipartisan spirit".  See e.g.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/03/alito_could_have_been_stopped_why_dems_should_have_filibustered_the_radical/
They were led by none other than Ken Salazar who now will live in infamy for his pusillanimous deference to zealots.

This Court stressed that its ruling applies only to corporations that are under the control of just a few people in which there is no essential difference between the business and its owners. So I guess if there's just a few rabid Islamics,  all they need to do is start a business and they can impose Sharia law on their workers.

Hopefully, Obama can find some way to do an end run around these shit bags, for the benefit of the women affected, and the citizens' rights they've trampled on.

See also:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's blistering response:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/231974154/Ginsburg-Dissent

Excerpt:

"Until this litigation, no decision of this court recognized a for-profit corporation's qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law, whether under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA.  The absence of such precedent is just what one would expect, for the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities.  As Chief Justice Marshall observed nearly two centuries ago:

"A corporation is "an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law."
------
and:

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/30/there_was_nothing_limited_about_scotus_hobby_lobby_ruling_why_it_matters_for_everyone/

 and:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/56685/the-supreme-court-thinks-corporations-are-people-but-women-aren't


http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tina-dupuy/56687/freedom-for-hobby-lobby-s-religion