As noted yesterday, one of the predictable effects of his ruling is that more employees of Hobby Lobby will become pregnant,unintentionally and, at times, in risk to the health of the woman and so it will lead to more abortions. Alito's ruling will lead to more abortions. Even he isn't so dull that he can't figure that one out. So I doubt that religion had anything to do with the ruling.
I realized sometime yesterday that in the thousands and thousands of words I've read on this I haven't read the phrase "Federalist Society" once. It is a mistake to think that this doesn't have everything to do with the plan to establish corporate fascism in the United States, which has been the clear and obvious goal of the Republican right for decades. They will do it through corporate personhood, doing for corporations what they've done for billionaires, turning them into super-persons by virtue of their enormous wealth and the freedom that the courts give them to corrupt governments and pollute the public right to know.
The ruling is incoherent because it is based in an intentional lie, distorting the law and its legislative history to do what those who wrote and adopted the law never intended. Alito is lying, just as he lied all through his confirmation hearing, just as he and Roberts, Thomas and Scalia did whenever they said that they couldn't comment on cases that might come before the court because they would judge those on the facts presented. They were lying because they were placed on the court because they were ideologically reliable. The Senate Judiciary committee shares a lot in the blame as do the media BECAUSE EVERYONE KNEW THEY WERE LYING WHEN THEY CLAIMED THAT.
This is all about lies and the permission given by The Constitution to Supreme Court "justices" to lie with complete impunity and a real life exemption from impeachment for what should be considered the most massive and serious form of perjury. Only the Constitution relied, rather quaintly, on things like honor and honesty, which are entirely absent from Republican-fascism.
-------
And on the leftish blogs I have seen it said, over and over again that the five fascists who issued this decision are Catholics and that that is determinative of this ruling, or that it's Christianity to blame or even monotheism. I suppose it would be interesting to have a survey of the employees of Hobby Lobby to see what their religious orientation is but I would bet my last cent that a good percentage, if not the vast majority of the women who will be disadvantaged by this ruling are Christians, most of whom use birth control and that a lot of those women who will be most effected are Catholics, who also, mostly use birth control. Demographics in the United States being what they are, the chances are very good that the majority of any roughly random group of 23,000 women in the country will mostly be comprised of Christians.
As to the Catholicism of the "justices", it doesn't seem to have any effect, whatsoever, on their activity concerning other issues. On many issues of social justice they are in direct violation of even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, these days quite a bit to the right of the Pope. I don't think their Catholicism has kept them from staying a single execution, even those on which even the two last very conservative Popes have tried to intervene in, with pleas for a stay of execution.
If, as the diatribes online against them repeat, over and over again, the five-fascists on the court voted the way they did because of their Catholicism, then they are clearly atypical of American Catholics who support and practice birth control at somewhat higher rates than the general population. Even world wide, the evidence is that most Catholics differ with the Vatican and with the Hobby Lobby Five on these issues.
I know in the non-Catholic imagination there is, frequently, the quaint old notion that was more frequently expressed in the past that Catholics were in lock step and brainwashed to follow orders from The Pope due to what they believe is the meaning of the unfortunately adopted and named dogma of papal infallibility. A dogma which I would suspect most Catholics don't believe and which is far more limited than the ignorant and bigoted love to to believe. That so many on the nominal left gas on like the most ignorant of fundamentalist bigots whenever the issue is Catholicism is quite funny and an invitation to look at other ways in which they are quite similar to people they love to believe they are so vastly superior to.
It would be genuinely funny if it wasn't stupid and a betrayal of ignorance and rather primitive bigotry of the kind usually associated with 19th century WASPs, in the only important aspect of it, potentially politically harmful to the left. As indicated in the survey results I noted yesterday, Catholics are quite often rather liberal if not very liberal, often very, very liberal by contemporary American standards. As seen on the court, Justice Sotomayor is an example of a liberal Catholic, though I wouldn't discount her being a woman had something to do with her dissent from the ruling.
I would generally be hesitant to speculate on such a thing but I strongly suspect that if Sandra Day O'Connor were on the court, she would have voted with Sotomayor. If there was one area in which O'Connor often broke with the other conservatives on the court (for a long time I called her and Rehnquist "The Doublemint Twins") it was in areas impinging on the rights of women. More women on the court is certainly a more salient issue to securing equality for women than Catholicism. That is what should be the focus of discussion.
But, then, I don't think that most of the futile fulmination on this issue on leftish blogs and mags has anything to do with the issues of the case but is just another excuse to stage click baiting hate sessions for the owners and the cliques of haters that they attract to their blogs and online magazines that way. And there is nothing like anti-religious bigotry to do that.
I'm beginning to reconsider the value of judicial opinions which effect sweeping changes in jurisprudence.
ReplyDeleteBurwell is, in a way, the offspring of Brown v. Board. The Warren Court meant to make a magnanimous change in law and effect justice, and I think the opinion did just that; until it didn't. 60 years later, Brown is not dead as judicial ruling but still very much alive as a guide for justices finding a way to support their preferred outcomes.
Not that Brown was a badly reasoned opinion, but it was such a sweeping one it opened the door to Court opinions that stopped ruling on the facts before them, and started ruling on social justice issues, which has now withered away to just "social issues." I really don't think there's any kind of "social justice" in declaring corporations have religious feelings which must be protected from forcing them to spend money on contraceptives for their employees. But justifying that outcome because it's the "right" thing to do? That's expressly what courts are not supposed to do, and yet this Court is determined to do that.
As Roberts said in another context, the way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating. It's a lovely and stupid tautology, but it is no way a statement of law: it's a statement of personal opinion, made law by the position of the person holding it. That's not the way the legal system is supposed to work, but I'm beginning to see the truth of the adage that history occurs once as tragedy, then repeats itself as farce. That is, whatever is unleashed (like the Brown decision) that is praiseworthy, eventually leads to farce (Burwell).
Or, in a slightly different context, the Scopes trial which was supposed to end fundamentalism, actually fueled it. Fundies were a quiet lot before that trial, but the mockery of Mencken, et al., infuriate them; and we live with those consequences now.
Be careful what you wish for, indeed.
It was Buckley v Valeo that did it for me, especially the position of Marshall, Blackmun and White, in that case. It proved to me that the sword of righteousness that the liberals wielded in "free speech" cases could be just as easily turned on us and that, with the power that of all that, not free, but money speech could buy for them. The conservatives were quite willing to give up the porn issue that didn't work as well for them as it once did for using the lines provided to them by people like Joel Gora and the ACLU to push corporate personhood and corporate fascism.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a post about Gora a while back, about his disgusting smugness over his role in the attacks on self-government by an accurately informed people. I absolutely despise that man.
http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/09/dump-american-civil-liberties-union.html
Though, perhaps, not so much as I detest one-time "most liberal in the universe, Village Voice, Progressive Magazine, scribbler and latter day Cato scribbler, Nat Hentoff.