Soraya has commentary at Time magazine.
In the practice of many religions, girls’ and women’s relationship to the divine are mediated, in strictly binary terms, by men: their speech, their ways of being and their judgments. Women’s behavior, especially sexual, is policed in ways that consolidate male power. It is impossible to be, in this particular case, a conservative Christian, without accepting and perpetuating the subordination of women to male rule. It is also blatant in “official” Catholicism, Mormonism, Evangelical Protestantism, Orthodox Judaism and Islam.
The fundamental psychology of these ideas, of religious male governance, does not exist in a silo, isolated from family structures, public life or political organization.
It certainly does not exist separately from our Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia, for example, makes no bones about his conscientious commitment to conservative Catholic ideals in his personal life and the seriousness of their impact on his work as a judge. There are many Catholics who reject these views, but he is not among them. These beliefs include those having to do with non-procreational sex, women’s roles, reproduction, sexuality, birth control and abortion. The fact that Scalia may be brilliant, and may have convinced himself that his opinions are a matter of reason and not faith, is irrelevant.
What is not irrelevant is that we are supposed to hold in abeyance any substantive concerns about the role that these beliefs, and their expression in our law, play in the distribution of justice and rights. They are centrally and critically important to women’s freedom, and we ignore this fact at our continued peril.
It would be a lot easier – and it would seem more reasonable – to bracket our substantive concerns about how the justices’ religious beliefs shape their legal views if we had any room to be confident that the justices were bracketing those religious beliefs.
Most of them have never seemed to bracket any of their beliefs very often.
This is a great commentary. I especially liked the part about how we (as a society) tend to assume the SCOTUS justices are without bias and that we shouldn’t question their own religious beliefs and how they might influence decisions. This is a terrible majority that we have right now; I only hope a sweeping abortion case doesn’t make it to their desks. They’d probably overturn Roe.
Yes, so did I. And I don’t assume that about their religious beliefs at all! I think it’s alarming that the Supreme Court is majority-Catholic.
I still can’t get over the fact that in a few short years SCOTUS has defined corporations as people, money as inherent to free speech and that the religious (and potentially moral) views of some are valued more highly than those of others based largely on who controls the financial power in the relationship.
It is shocking and appalling and represents a baseline degradation of what it means to be an free citizen residing in a functioning society.
I care about this, not because I live in the USA, but because I don’t. That means that I am powerless to take part in the internal debate within your country but at the same time the western democracy I live in will inevitably be pulled in the same direction under the influence of cultural gravity.
How does a nation that so admires individual rights and liberty allow real live human beings to be made no more important than a lifeless legal construct; and the rights of one individual to be amplified over that of many based soley on access to money?
Does Hobby Lobby’s insurance pay for Viagra?
Marcus Ranum:
More than likely. Obviously, I don’t know the situation at all HLs, but the one in Bismarck, ND, is staffed almost entirely by women. Women who can’t afford to say “take this job and shove it”.
Viagra would be fine, as long as it’s used in a circumstance where a woman could conceivably conceive.
Hobby Lobby invests in corporations that produce birth control. Boom.
I am far less concerned about how Scalia’s religious beliefs shape his legal views than I am about the influence of his wife, who has served on the board of one anti-abortion organization and as Assistant Director of another, who advertises herself as “Pro-Life” AND as a “Crisis Pregnancy Counselor.”
Why has this douchenozzle Scalia not recused himself, given this extreme conflict of interest???
Blanche Quizno
I’m glad you found A Woman to Blame™
Why talk about the man who actually makes the decisions, right?
+++
In my European eyes, SCOTUS is a deeply religious institution in and of itself. It’s nature isn’t unlike Papacy: While elected or appointed by a group of representatives, the people are from that moment on very special and apart from ordinary folks.
Holy shit, I don’t believe the German Constitutional Court to be perfect, while they have penty of good decisions (like striking down discrimination against gay people), they also have plenty of bad ones (like deciding that we can now preemptively defend Germany in Afghanistan), but there’s no reverence paid to the judges like in the USA, no cult of personality. It’s telling that I can name most members of SCOTUS but have no clue who’s the president of the German Constitutional Court.
Much of that admiration, though, is really skin deep. In practice instead of on paper Americans’ rights have often been interpreted through the lens of racist and misogynistic sophistry that characterizes the Roberts’ court (which is more of a return to the norm for the supreme court as compared to being anomalous). It is, after all, the same institution that produced Plessy v. Fergusson, Dred Scott, and far more recently handed the entire country over to Bush.
A good book on this subject is Andrew Gumbel’s Steal This Vote with regards to the realities of American ‘democracy’.
Rob @ 4,
Have a look, when you get a minute, at Justice Ginsburg’s dissent where she examines where this idea that corporation = person comes from, what it was and wasn’t supposed to mean.
Have not read every word of the majority decision so don’t know whether they address that too.
I would love to see legislation passed which gave employees the power to take private ownership of their existing benefits. An initial cut at what would seem to do the trick:
Create a simple “Private Ownership of Insurance” government form which employees can fill out, listing their name and employer, and submit to the IRS. Government delivers the request to employer. Upon receiving request, employer must:
Within 10 days, consolidate/package up the employee’s current health-insurance coverage at the time of the request (with massive fines + compensatory damages for any shortfalls/omissions), and submit back to government and employee for review.
Within 60 days, do following 3 things
1) Put the coverage package into an “open market” for insurance companies to bid on and accept for life-long contractual coverage of the employee (fixed cost, fixed coverage, for life). Packages put on the market would need to be anonymous and stripped of all references to age/gender/pre-existing conditions.
2) Sell the package on the market – that is, obtain a contractual commitment from an accredited insurer to deliver said benefits for the fixed rate for the life of the employee.
3) Deliver to the employee and IRS this contract, along with a form which gives employee the choice of either
3-A) Continuing with current employer coverage (i.e. maintain status quo)
3-B) Accept ownership of their coverage, which would entail
* A line-item / tax-exempt[1] addition to their paycheck equal to the cost of the contract, and
* The option to accept the contract with the insurance company “as is”, or to shop around for other insurance policies of their choice, or choose to do whatever they’d like with the added compensation (the employer would have no insight into this decision, they are done at the paycheck)
[1] The tax-exemption of this line item would hinge on 1 question: did the taxpayer (and any dependents) have health insurance coverage during the underlying pay period? If yes, the line-item is tax-exempt. If no, it’s just normal old salary.
Seems like a win-win-win: Employees have all the power. Employers don’t have to directly purchase insurance plans with which they do not agree. Insurance companies can make coverage decisions based on “the right” criteria (e.g. just the requested coverage; not pre-existing health status), and offer that coverage at their own discretionary price.
Maybe I am in a minority , but atleast in this case , the judges seem to have given a constitutionally sound reason (not the least burdensome way of implementing contraception coverage for all) .IANAL.
@deepak:
I sort of thought so too, until I read the dissent. There will always be a less burdensome way of providing benefits (make the government pay), so the “least burdensome” argument is a bad one. You can’t just make the government pick up the tab for everything the employers don’t like.
Add that to everything else wrong about the case (the ruling didn’t take into account how the employer’s “religious liberty” harmed the employees, it didn’t actually bother to justify how the contraception coverage was overly burdensome when there’s such a distance between providing a health insurance plan with many possible uses and one particular optional use, it decided that non-profit and for-profit institutions should be treated the same when there’s no reason to do so and other areas usually don’t, it asserted that the ruling only applied to contraceptives but failed to justify why it was narrow, and so on), and the result is damning.
Seriously, the dissent is amazing. Go read it.
The fact that the court has been packed with SIX right-wing catholics is frightening enough. That our system of vetting has allowed empty heads like Scalia and Clarence Thomas to sit at the head of a branch of the US government is an absolute scandal.
We can look forward to decades more of this crap. The confirmation of Thomas was the ‘pitchforks and torches’ moment and the American public slept right through it.
The US public slept through the confirmation of Thomas??! You must be joking!
@chris J
There will always be a less burdensome way of providing benefits (make the government pay), so the “least burdensome” argument is a bad one.
But the key is that the less burdensome option already exists. That’s why i feel that particular argument maybe sound. That isnt to say I agree with the ruling (in my view the exception for religious institutions should have never existed in the first place and therefore a less burdensome way would not have existed)
it asserted that the ruling only applied to contraceptives but failed to justify why it was narrow, and so on), and the result is damning.
Agreed – unless the SC is now in the business of deciding what really matters to a religion they cannot narrow it to contraceptives.