- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

Hobby Lobby for Idiots And Judges

I suppose I can quit posting about Hobby Lobby, sometime after the left quits getting hysterical about it.   From a federal judge with his knickers in a twist, Hercules and the Umpires [1]:

In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a “person” entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was “closely held” by family members. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.

To most people, the decision looks stupid ’cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynistic because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While “looks” don’t matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public’s acceptance of the law.

Hobby Lobby as explained by Bookworm: [2]

In 1993, a Democrat Congress passed, and a Democrat president signed, the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (“RFRA”). RFRA holds in relevant part that the federal government may act in a way that substantially burdens the exercise of religion only if it can establish that its action is the least restrictive means of advancing a compelling government interest. Nothing in the Act distinguishes between individuals and corporations.

The administrative rule at issue is the edict from Health and Human Services (“HHS”) mandating that all corporations affected by Obamacare must provide their female employees with unlimited access to all contraceptives available on the market.

Hat tip: Neo-Neocon [3].

The court ruled that a board [IOM] of unelected bureaucrats appointed by Kathleen Sebelius do not have the right to trample the religious liberty of free citizens.   Not only did the IOM decree that women had the right to “free” contraception, the IOM rubber stamped every single method approved by the Food and Drug Administration.