COVID-19 & Healthcare

Must see: Couples talk about what marriage means to them

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Connolly v Roche is one of the lawsuits before the US District Court in Phoenix seeking to overturn Arizona’s ban on gay marriage. The plaintiffs are asking for a summary judgement and sent these videos of the plaintiff’s to the judge to convey how the ban makes life difficult and scary for committed couples who … Read more

Cathi Herrod, Goldwater Institute, & AZ Taxpayer PAC Spread Medicaid Lies on Twitter

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While following the ongoing #HobbyLobby Twitter storm today, I bumped into several Tweets by the Arizona Taxpayer Action Committee. (I have no idea how things like this get into my Twitter feed.) What caught my eye was that Goldwater Institute and Center for Arizona Policy documents were linked to the Tweets and former Arizona Legislator and Medicaid-expansion denier Frank Antenori (@FrankAntenori), @SonoranAlliance (Blog for Arizona’s evil right-wing twin), and @GodCountryFam reTweeted all of these.

AZTaxpayerAct2:54pm via Twitter Web Client

If you’re an Arizona legislator & voted for Medicaid expansion in 2013, you voted to allow tax $’s for abortion: blog.azpolicy.org/life/medicaid-…

Retweeted by FrankAntenori and 1 others

AZTaxpayerAct3:04pm via Twitter Web Client

If you voted for Obamacare Medicaid Expansion you voted for corporate cronyism for the healthcare industrial complex goldwaterinstitute.org/blog/medicaid-…

Retweeted by FrankAntenori and 1 others

AZTaxpayerAct3:11pm via Twitter Web Client

AZ legislators were warned against voting for Obamacare Medicaid but chose to listen to big money from the healthcare industrial complex.

Retweeted by FrankAntenori and 1 others

AZTaxpayerAct3:09pm via Twitter Web Client

AZ legislators who voted for Obamacare Medicaid Expansion voted for tax hike as high as $739 Million over 2014-2019: goldwaterinstitute.org/10-reasons-to-…

Retweeted by FrankAntenori and 1 others

Alright, they made me look…

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The “abortifacient” thing is really an attempt to fool themselves more than anyone else

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Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com

hobby lobby

Libby Anne of Patheos has an excellent run-down of Monday’s Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court. Read the whole thing but I wanted to focus on this part here, which was very well put:

Next question, the majority says that the birth control mandate does place a “substantial burden” on Hobby Lobby’s religious beliefs. And this sentence is crucial: “The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients.”

Note how carefully Alito worded that sentence, “according to their religious beliefs” these items are abortifacients. He had to word it this carefully because the four contraceptives at issue (Mirena, Paragard, Plan B, and Ella) are NOT, in fact, abortifacients according to the FDA. This is really crucial. The majority allowed Hobby Lobby to define for itself what in fact causes an abortion. There is a difference, you see, between saying “my religious belief is that abortion is immoral” [the religious belief Hobby Lobby has really pushed hard in all its filings] and saying “my religious belief is that Mirena causes abortion.” The first cannot and should not be challenged by a court, if that’s your belief, that’s your belief. The second is a question of fact, which can be proved or disproved via science. Individuals should not be able to declare that anything they dislike causes abortion and therefore avoid any laws relating to that item. Because there is no steady, safe line to draw between those who think IUDs cause abortions and those who think Tylenol causes abortion. Both are scientifically incorrect statements. For a court to accept the first and throw out the second because it’s “ludicrous” is picking and choosing favorites among religious beliefs, an extremely dangerous path.

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hanger

Restricting Access to Care Will Kill American Women, Children

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DIY abortions will increase as women's rights decrease.
DIY abortions will increase as women’s rights decrease.

Today, five men on the US Supreme Court ruled that closely held, for-profit businesses can deny birth control coverage to women employees on the grounds that the corporate person’s religious freedom has been somehow diminished.

The SCOTUS decision on two cases– Burwell vs Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialities vs Burwell– is just the most recent assault on women’s rights and reproductive freedom.

In recent years, hundreds of bills passed by red state legislatures have chipped away at women’s rights to the extent that lives will be lost as more women are denied access to affordable contraception, women’s health services, and legal abortions. Although the south has been particularly hard hit, many states (including Arizona) have been working diligently to restrict access by burdening clinics with unnecessary regulations. Republicans in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana are shutting down nearly all of their clinics.  Ohio Republicans want to stop women from using IUDs— one of the most effective forms of birth control.

In many states, women now are forced to drive hundreds of miles to have legal abortions or  drive to Mexico for a dangerous backroom deal or buy do-it-yourself drugs at flea markets or have children they cannot physically, financially or emotionally care for. Several states that have curtailed women’s health services– like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Louisana–  have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. These Republican strategies will result in pre-mature death– especially for poor women and their children.

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Hobby Lobby is a radical departure from religious exercise jurisprudence

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The five conservative activist Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that the legal fiction of a corporation, albeit a closely held corporation, possesses religious liberty rights (free exercise), and therefore may “freeload” off of taxpayers by refusing to pay the corporation’s cost of providing for contraceptive coverage offered in its employer provided health care plan, because the board of directors of this closely held corporation hold a deeply personal religious objection to contraceptives.

The Founding Fathers clearly understood and intended that the rights and liberties afforded by the Bill of Rights were individual rights and liberties of citizens. The Founders were wary of the power of corporations, hence the term “corporation” appears nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Corporations were of limited duration, and chartered by the states.

What the conservative activist Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court did today is a radical departure from long-standing free exercise jurisprudence. They engaged in legislating from the bench their own language into the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to give the act a meaning never intended by Congress (see Ginsburg dissent).

This is yet another in a line of decisions by the Roberts Court transforming this country into a corporatocracy ruled by an über-rich wealthy elite plutocracy. Individual rights and liberties are secondary to the rights and liberties of our corporate overlords.

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