Monday, June 30, 2014

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."
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and:

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

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