The Hobby Lobby case.
It’s finally happened. The conservative Catholic gang have found a case where they could drop their pretense of legal objectivity in favor of (male) bosses’ supposed “religious rights” to interfere with female employees’ personal healthcare.
Note that there is no pretense whatsoever that this decision is fair and equal with respect to its effect on both men and women. On the contrary, the 5-judge majority make it clear that only women are allowed to be victims of their employers’ religious prejudice under this decision. The Court wrote that it intends this decision to apply only to forms of contraception specifically for females (which would have been covered by the employees’ insurance under the ACA) and NOT to apply to any other employer “religious” objections such as those against transfusions or vaccines, which might affect both male and female equally. Hobby Lobby’s paid health insurance will still cover vasectomies. And erectile-disfunction prescriptions.
In addition, the Court rationalizes its destruction of women’s rights of equal access to health care by pretending that this decision affects only a tiny segment of the USAian corporate economy. This is not even close to true. It applies to IRS-defined “closely-held” corporations (where 50 percent of the stock is held by no more than 5 individuals; the remaining stock may be publicly traded, or not.) These closely-held corporations constitute more than 90 percent of the total number of businesses in the US, and employ more than 50 percent of the total labor force.
SInce there cannot be any test for “sincerity of beliefs”, every small partnership/corporation can now declare that it has “religious” objections to complying with the contraceptive provisions of the ACA, which were supposed to protect all citizens equally.
It’s going to be one hell of a mess. Suddenly, every woman in the nation has her personal health at risk (at least potentially at risk, depending on their being lucky or unlucky with a rational or irrational employer) because of the perversion of five men in the US Supreme Court.
This particular group of Supreme Court justices will go down in history as one of the worst ever, perhaps even worse than the Dred Scott court. Short of hoping for better replacement justices (and then hoping for a speedy overturn of this biased decision) there doesn’t seem to be any rational course of action to restore secularism and respect for the principle of equal treatment under law.
You don’t mention here the recent ‘buffer zone’ decision, which I find equally horrible–especially coming from a Court that is quck to enforce its own buffer zone against protesters. They suck.
Yep, that they do, walto.
Someone suggested the next strategy is to use the buffer-zone decision against Hobby Lobby: get on the public sidewalk in front of the store, and “counsel” shoppers (who are mostly women) about the immorality of giving money to a corporation that’s depriving women of healthcare. IF the rent-a-cops/town cops try to hassle/arrest you, take it to the courts, all the way to the Supremes if necessary.
But I remain unconvinced that 1) it would work or 2) that it’s a morally -acceptable strategy.
If anything, this illustrates the dangers of relying on corporate fascists for health care benefits. Obamacare was essentially a surrender — we need a viable national healthcare program, publically funded.
Almost nothing ever works when it comes to political action, so I get that part, but what concerns you about morality of that strategy, hotshoe?
Eh, not completely sure of my own thoughts on the issue but has to do with the conflict between:
“free speech” rights for the protesters who want to put their facts/opinions into the pathway of the HL shoppers/Planned Parenthood visitors …
versus
the unenumerated rights of the shoppers/visitors to be free to go about their legal conduct without interference, without being shouted at, without getting accidentally or on-purpose jostled while running the gauntlet of protesters, possibly feeling threatened, forced to look over ugly images when all one wants is to get in a little shopping/medical care in peace and safety …
I passionately hate the pro-enslavement-of-women anti-abortionists. Since they have a tactic of invading visitors’ personal space, that action becomes morally tainted in my mind. I don’t want to be like them. Can I say the ends justify the means? Can I believe it because my chosen ends of health and equality for women are clearly superior to the desired ends of the anti-abortion harassers?
Dare I hope that, if I were on the HL protest line, my means would not be as foul as theirs, that I would not get angry, look threatening, and frighten the wits out of some poor woman who just wanted to buy poster paint for her kid’s science fair project?
And even if I persuade myself that my ends justify the means, are sidewalk confrontations with women shoppers really the best means of getting a solution to the problem of corporate-paid healthcare? Remember, the women aren’t the problem, and they can’t fix it themselves The source of the problem here is five-times-billionaire David Green and the other Hobby Lobby execs, along with the hateful ReThuglican congress (and the untouchable gangsters on the Supreme Court ). They’re the problem; they’re the morally-legitimate targets of any effort to solve the problem.
So what is a possible and morally-acceptable strategy?
God help me, I have no idea.
I’m fascinated by the spin being put on this decision by the left in the US. Ultimately what the court decided is that the owners of a closely held corporation cannot be compelled to provide a form of birth control which they consider immoral based on their religious beliefs. That’s very much aligned with Justice Hugo Black’s views:
I disagree with the position of the owners of Hobby Lobby, but if the situation were reversed I would not want them to be able to force me to pay for healing prayer, abstinence only sex education, or any other treatment. If I value my rights, I must support theirs.
This ruling doesn’t deny women the right to purchase any birth control they wish. It simply recognizes, unusually for this government, that compelling people to violate their beliefs is wrong.
cannot be compelled to provide
They’re not actually “providing” anything–they’re paying some portion of health insurance premiums. Suppose they have religious objections to organ transplants, too. Or indeed to any traditional medicine at all (as Christian Scientists do).
When I pay my taxes, I’m not “violating my beliefs” just because my government does something stupid with the money. I’m fulfilling an obligation of citizenship here. It’s all in the same Socratic dialogue I couldn’t get William to read.
If you want a system with the efficacy of the VA and the compassion of the IRS, by all means push for socialized medicine.
If you want to get the best health care for the most people, the very first step is to decouple insurance from employment. Corporations can deduct the cost of insurance, individuals cannot. Changing that one inequity would eliminate a host of problems.
After that, opening up the medical profession to more competition, eliminating onerous regulations on insurers, and making contraception available over-the-counter will help far more people than more government ever could.
Hah–“onerous regulations on insurers.” You need to read some Dickens too.
Suppose they do. Would you, personally, use force to make them act against their beliefs? I wouldn’t.
If you wouldn’t do it personally, but are willing to pay others to do it, that doesn’t make you any more moral, it just shows you to be a coward.
I suggest rather that you need to read some non-fiction about economics and history.
Oh, Patrick thanks for that. I’m sure I have no idea about regulation (and of insurance in particular), and I’m happy to be guided by you. I’ll start with Rand and finish with Hayek and Rothbard–some of the real geniuses. I’m guessing that’s where you’re coming from. While I eagerly devour that brilliant literature, let me suggest a nice vacation for you!
BTW, I’ve actually published several economics papers. You?
However, the owners of the corporation were not being asked to provide any birth control at all. Rather, they were being asked to provide insurance. What kind of birth control to be used, if any, would be decided by the employee and her physician, not by the owners of the corporation.
Patrick,
Your views about what “acting against your beliefs” means puts you in a Nozickian paradise. (One that R.N. dumped support for as he got a little older and wiser.) May you live to find yourself in one!
Neil Rickert,
Neil, Patrick believes he gets to pick every provision of every insurance (and other) policy he subsidizes.
It takes a village of Patricks.
They were being compelled by the force of the government to pay for a form of contraception that they consider immoral. It doesn’t matter how many layers get inserted, the outcome is that they are being coerced into violating their beliefs.
Just as you are being coerced when you subsidize a country that requires any tax payments, right?
Utopia is not an option.
My morality is that I don’t have any right to use force against people who aren’t threatening me. It doesn’t matter how many people I get to agree with me, I still don’t have that right.
The biggest problem I have with both major political parties in the US is their inherent authoritarianism. Both want to use government force against otherwise peaceful people.
Try some voluntary approaches first. You might be surprised. You’ll certainly be less immoral.
But you get your utopia whether you want it or not. There can be no public ownership–no parks or roads or water supplies–no community activity at all (no armies, no police, no nothing), given such a perspective. Social contracts require giving up something to get something. If everyone has to agree on every provision of every social item, there cannot be any social items. It is thus, a Nozickian paradise of all against all. Not even Locke’s state of nature is so fiercely anti-everybody but me.
Nice for Wilt Chamberlain, not so nice for everybody else.
Well, they can agree to go along with the laws and mores of the larger society, or they can pack up and leave. Nobody is coercing them to stay.
No. They were compelled to provide insurance, not birth control.
The decision on birth control would still be up to the employee and her physician.
As far as I know, the actuarial cost of insurance that covers birth control is lower than the actuarial cost of insurance that does not cover birth control.
These same employers are also compelled to pay their employees a salary, and the employee could choose to use that salary for something that the corporate bosses did not approve of. Can they therefore opt out of paying a salary, because it might be used for something contrary to their religion?
The whole medical “insurance” concept is entirely without merit.
Insurance is for unusual occurrences, with risks shared.
Routine medical care, including birth control, should come out of savings, and people should be able to shop for the best combination of care and price they can find.
I’m not an ideological libertarian; just a pragmatist. I look for ways to build systems that work efficiently.
I would not be opposed to “involuntary” medical savings. An extension of Medicare withholding would be an improvement over anything now being done. If it could be considered a national healthcare system or single payer, so be it.
But I would separate out routine care, which I think should come out of savings, and catastrophic care and special needs care. I really don’t like preferred providers. I think people should have the option of paying out of pocket any extra expenses incurred by choosing their provider.
That’s the way it works with Medicare. I shop for service and price. I needed surgery last year and choose to go to a teaching hospital. Out of my $55,000 bill, I payed less than a thousand. But the only limit on my choice was what I was willing to pay out of pocket.
I haven’t yet read Alito’s opinion, but from my 30,000 foot view it’s hard to see the difference between:
1) requiring Christian business owners to pay insurance premiums that finance the use of contraceptives that they consider to be immoral, and
2) requiring pacifists to pay taxes that finance drone strikes in Yemen, which they consider to be immoral.
Is there a sharp legal distinction between taxation and mandatory spending? Any JDs out there who can point me to the relevant legal doctrine?
That’s great. I love efficient systems. The problem here is that it’s not about having efficient systems, but about making sure that people receive the care they need. And as soon as you insert people in a system, no matter how efficient, stuff becomes messy.
Ask people to make sure they set enough money aside to be able to afford their yearly checkup at the dentist’s and the local physician, and your lower incomes will in no time walk around with open sores and rotten teeth. It’s not that people are stupid, although they are, but it’s because people are idiots.
Right. Furthermore, Patrick (quite sensibly, IMO) moves out from the confines of religious morality to secular ethics. And from there you can get that people should not have to pay taxes at all if they consider the idea of taxation immoral. Based on his posts here, I take it Patrick is an example of such a person. Obviously, you can’t get any government at all in that case–drones or no drones.
Have fun with this:
“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent”. (NIV, 1 Timothy 2:11-12)
Funny you should mention that, Richardthughes: William, Gregory and I are going to discuss that passage in detail in our forthcoming book!
No one can make sure people receive the care they need.
What we could do is make sure it is financially possible for people to receive care.
When a bureaucracy has the power to micromanage what care you receive, it will screw nearly everybody. If you give government the power to decide at the procedure level, what is eligible and what isn’t, you will eventually have a nightmare system. The incentives are all wrong.
If the micro-regulated system is so great, why wouldn’t it work for other products? Shoes, razor blades, cell phones, toothpaste, dinner?
I have no problem with Medicare-like systems, where people can decide who to go to based on what kind of co-payment they want to pay.
Personal example: I need cataract surgery. Going to a teaching hospital and having the basic surgery would cost me
4000 per eye. I haven’t decided, but I don’t want a bureaucrat deciding for me. I am willing to have Medicare decide how much they will contribute, but I would like to set my own priorities.
If you let politics decide what you have in life and what you don’t. you will eventually reach a point where you violently disagree.
It is simply insane to think that politics could always do the right thing if only the right people ran things.
Power attracts the wrong kind of people. It is inevitable as the WEASEL game. Set up the attractor and you get WEASELS.
Is all taxation “government force against peaceful people”?
If yes, how do you propose to support any real civil society when the existing oligarchs can buy all the parks, roads, bridges, schooling, medical care, courts/arbitrators etc they want? And they have ZERO ,motivation to share them with you (not out of the “goodness of their hearts”, that’s for sure). Don’t be pie-in-the-sky about it; what’s the real alternative to taxation?
If no, then how do you see a moral line between taking taxes from a CEO and his corporation, which the government will then use to directly pay for birth control for some women
versus
taking insurance payments from a CEO and his corporation, which the insurance company will then use to provide birth control …
what’s the diff?
Be real. Don’t just repeat David Green’s lie that he can’t be forced to pay for birth control against his “religious” objections. Clearly, he can be forced to do so, because he can be forced to pay taxes. He pays his taxes (voluntarily, given the alternatives) even though he knows the moment he signs his check that he’s buying birth control with some of that money. Why aren’t his “religious” objections sufficient to get him out of paying his birth-control-funding taxes?
We know he’s lying in order to propagate his hatred of women’s independence and sexuality (because he knows that godbotting is a respectable excuse for thuggery and misogyny in US society). I hate to think what a non-theist’s motivation is for repeating Green’s lies.
What you can do is increase the chance. I’m serious: people are idiots, and we’ll never take responsibility for our own lives or anything else if we can get away with it. And that’s not going to change either. So we let natural selection settle the whole thing, and let the rich idiots shield themselves from the abject poverty of the poor idiots, or we can make sure that at least the less-haves have no choice about visiting a dentist in stead of buying the latest samsung to show off the neighbours.
I’m all for mandatory health-care insurance, anyway.
Waitup. I’ve to read the rest of your comment too –
Ah, no. Don’t want that. There’s a basic insurance that covers stuff everybody always needs – like making sure you’re not left bleeding in a gutter when a garden gnome cuts off your feet – and then there’s optional packages. You’re required to have the basic. Usually insurance companies will dictate what kind of care they are willing to pay for in what package. No gvt micromanagement.
Yeah, something like that. It works over here.
So the purpose of government is to make it possible for people to shift the burden of responsibility?
I can see some need for this if people have a history of mismanaging their own care at public expense, but I do not agree it should be the default.
I find it interesting that food stamps used to be highly regulated, and narrowly targeted toward nutritious foods. There has been a fairly successful rebellion against this, and it is now possible to buy anything with food stamps. There are active gray and black markets that can exchange food stamps for anything you might desire.
Thinking you can prevent this is simply foolish. Unless you imprison everyone, you cannot force people to make good decisions. And if you have paid attention to prisons, you will know that you can’t micromanage the economic decisions of prisoners.
So the decision is not between hell and utopia. the decision is between allowing people to take responsibility for their lives or treating everyone like a self-destructive child.
Again, I am not making an argument against taxation. I am making an argument against giving away power to people who have a long history of mismanaging it, and who have perverse incentives.
Exactly. But in the same sense that we shift the responsibility for growing our food to farmers, and baking bread to bakers, and brewing beer to brewers, and keeping garden gnomes at bay to the Armed Forces.
Should / is. Yeah. I remind you: we’re idiots. Usually. Mostly.
Not familiar with the concept. Down here, there’s basic welfare on various levels (eg. single, single mother, disabled, unemployed, etc). Whatever you do with it is your concern. There’s discussion about who should receive it, how much, and how much should be done to give all of the (above) a better chance at a productive life, but eh. It’s like income, but much less. Scientifically calculated to suffice. Unless you want that samsung.
Well, no foodstamps, less foolishness, I’d say.
Agreed! The choice is between various levels of hell.
Yes. But in the end, you’ll have to ask yourself the question: do you want lots of people to walk around with open sores and rotten teeth (or worse, lie dying in the streets on cold nights)? Because that’s what happens if you let natural selection do its thing. It’s the reason we’ve been moving as far away from nature as possible for the past ten thousand years. Responsibility, sure. But many people haven’t the capabilities to grab for what they think they should have. They’re going to get buttfucked. So, how many people do you want to have a shot at happiness?
No animosity here, by the way. Just trying to get a grasp on the conversation. Me, my philosophy is twofold: 1) people are idiots most of the time, 2) let’s do what’s best for everybody – not what’s best for most. If 90% of the people can have a decent life while 10% have to wallow in shit, that’s not good enough. Let’s at least make it perfumed shit.
I haven’t advocated red in tooth and claw social Darwinism.
One could easily make the case that people left unattended make terrible food choices, unwise housing choices, stupid automobile choices, and so forth. there is no aspect of living that people do not screw up.
And particularly in food choices, they shorten their lives.
So how do you recommend fixing that?
Yes! People are idiots. We’re idiots we are.
Well, education obviously. But beyond that, welfare. At least give everybody the basic means. Enough money to run their (the poor schmucks) household (minimalistically). Leave it up to them to use it wisely. They won’t, but most of them won’t end up on the streets.
Hell, I don’t know. But they’re all sentient feeling beings, even the stupid idiots who made bad decisions and/or ended up in cardboard boxes. If there’s something that can be done to reduce the number of people living in cardboard boxes, even if it means me giving up a few rooms in my house, or some of the televisions in it, I say do it.
I don’t see how this differs from what I have said. Are you really disagreeing with me, or have you pigeonholed me as a heartless exploiter?
Education is hard. I have an MA in special education and spent seven years as a social worker in children’s protective services. I know firsthand how stupid people can be and how badly they can make decisions.
I also know how underground economies develop when you attempt to control how people spend their welfare money. What you wind up with is people who get fifty cents on the dollar after the illegal exchange, and cannot complain because they are lawbreakers. Illicit exploitation is far more destructive than corporate exploitation. and being cared for can be far more destructive than being taught as a child that there are consequences for decisions.
This is not a black and white issue. I wish I could wave a wand and fix things, but I can’t. I would merely point out that political slogans and protests don’t fix things either.
Yes. No! … Are you a garden gnome?
Then don’t! For Zarquon’s sake. Ensure a minimum, relative to the position (eg. longterm unemployed, disabled, single mother, etc), and let people manage. And the rest is a repetition of my above comments. Wurgl.
http://nuwen.net/culture.html
OMagain,
Greg Bear sides with Shapiro, you know? Don’t know if SF writers are your way to go…
IMHO:
The need to offload responsibility to a benevolent tyrant is there, just not the possibility of it truly happening. Hence the popularity of cults, religion, cult like behaviour, the ID stuff I tend to talk about etc.
A ‘slap-drone’ following you about and actually enforcing anti-stupidity (that you’ve asked for help on!) would soon have you trained. In the here and now we delegate, or are about to, decisions about our health etc to software that watches what we eat and how long we exercise for.
The benevolent tyrant is almost upon us! Except I don’t imagine it would be anything quite like in the quote. Much more anodyne. Less consequences for exceeding the slap-drone’s patience. 😛
So in this example, here, there’s no possibility of the person selling their foodstamps as (say it like Opera) everybody’s got a drone.
But seriously, the obvious way to stop welfare fraud/abuse is to wipe out welfare. The need for it, that is.
When we live in a world where a single person could afford to buy every house in a major city then I think we’re having the wrong conversation. Like food, there is plenty of money to go around, but people starve and people are poor.
my 2c..
Amazon wishlisted!
David Green, the Hobby Lobby exec who wants to enslave his female employees with pregnancies they wish to prevent and can’t afford – yeah, him, he’s got more than 5 Billion US dollar personal wealth. You make a good point: he could afford to buy every one of his employees a modest home. (About 21,000 employees, about 2 billion for that many average houses. )
David Green could choose to turn his lying suit against contraception into a genuine example of “christian” caring for “god’s children” by endowing a full college scholarship for each baby born to one of his employees who renounced birth control; he could throw in a lifetime’s worth of diapers and baby food, too. Of course, that would mean he wouldn’t still have billions; he’d just have millions but no one is asking him to starve to death or take the shoes off his own kids’ feet.
But no, like almost all right-wingers, his motivations have nothing to do with the religion he pretends is important, nothing to do with christian charity, nothing to do with “love thy neighbor”, nothing to do with “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Everything to do with his personal need to dominate women and ensure that they remain second class, subservient to him.
How convenient for him that his bible says “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” Funny how he happens to believe that part of his church doctrine, but can’t believe the part in the same supposedly-holy bible about camels and rich men.
No surprise David Green is also a liar about birth control in his personal life, too. He and his wife only have three children. They’ve been using birth control for years. God damn him and all his lying allies.
hotshoe,
I don’t see any evidence that Green is lying about that. Like many evangelicals, he doesn’t object to birth control per se — just to the methods he believes are tantamount to abortion. Of the 20 forms of contraception covered by Obamacare, he objects to four.
Here’s an odd bit of logic from the beginning of Alito’s opinion:
The whole point of incorporating is to establish the corporation as a separate legal person. It can own property, incur debt, and enter into contracts, just like a real person. It pays taxes. It can sue and be sued.
The advantage for the owners is that they are shielded from the corporation’s liabilities. Creditors can only go after the corporation’s assets. The owners’ assets are off limits.
The HHS mandate, like any other liability, applies to the corporation, not to its owners. Yet Alito is arguing that the mandate somehow negates the rights of the owners under the RFRA.
So for Alito, separate corporate personhood is fine when it protects the owners from shouldering corporate liabilities, but not when it prevents owners from pushing their religious beliefs into the corporate workplace.
Christ. You don’t have the right to impose your religious views on your employees, you daft bastard.
“Love it or leave it” was a common phrase in the US back in the Viet Nam war days. I don’t think you’d like to be aligned with the type of people who used to say it.
The situation is that Party A is offering an employment contract to Party B. The contract being offered includes a particular benefits package. Party A is not forcing Party B to take part in the contract; Party B is free to accept it or decline it.
You want to come in as Party C and require Party A to change the terms of the offered contract or disallow it altogether. You are willing to use force to accomplish your goal.
Look at which way the gun is pointing. That’s a good way to figure out who is in the wrong.
They were being compelled to pay for an insurance policy that, in turn, pays for a form of birth control they consider immoral.
Just as I would not want the owners of Hobby Lobby forcing me to violate my beliefs, I would not force them to violate theirs. I might disagree with them, but they are human beings, not tools for me to use to achieve my goals.
Governments are like lawyers, you only need one if the other guy has one.
I do consider it highly immoral for the gang of thugs that calls themselves the government to extort and steal money from the populace. It’s even more immoral when that money is used to build an empire on the bodies of dead children in other countries.
Maybe it isn’t possible to completely eliminate government, but it is certainly possible to restrict it solely to defense of the physical borders of the country and protecting citizens against force and fraud.
Once we’re at that stage, we can talk about voluntary means of achieving those ends.