Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
Some good news for reproductive rights in Arizona, and elsewhere, from the Supreme Court:
The U.S. Supreme Court this morning rejected a bid by attorneys for the state to overturn a federal appellate court ruling which had concluded the limits illegally infringe on the constitutional right of women to terminate a pregnancy. The justices gave no reason for their decision.
Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com
Per Ian Millhiser:
Citing Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court’s decision last June holding that the religious objections of a business’ owners could trump federal rules requiring that business to include birth control coverage in its health plan, a federal judge in Utah held last week that a member of a polygamist religious sect could refuse to testify in a federal investigation into alleged violations of child labor laws because he objects to testifying on religious grounds…
…The federal child labor investigation arose from a CNN report investigating claims that Jeffs “ordered all schools closed for a week so children could go to work picking pecans off trees at a private ranch” in Utah. The report included video of “hundreds of children, many of them very small” working on the ranch. When the reporters arrived, CNN also caught video of the FLDS children fleeing the cameras.
Yet, according to an order signed by Judge David Sam, a Reagan appointee to a trial court in Utah, the federal officials investigating this alleged violation of child labor laws will not be able to require an FLDS member named Vernon Steed to provide information that could aid the investigation because Steed objects to giving certain testimony on religious grounds. Steed claims that he’s made “religious vows ‘not to discuss matters related to the internal affairs or organization of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.’” According to Judge Sam’s opinion, that’s enough to exempt him from providing the testimony he does not want to give.
Whoops.
Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
I was warned not to read Doug MacEachern’s piece on Hobby Lobby. I should have listened.
A lot about the majority decision in the Hobby Lobby case has made liberals go all crazy in the head (see: here, here, here and, emphatically, here) .
But there is one part of the decision that makes them craziest in the head. And that would be that notion of for-profit corporations being people too.
Which is just nuts. Or, better yet, crazy in the head. The Left is utterly committed to the duty of corporations to act morally in uncounted ways. And not just in some loosely defined notion of “corporate responsibility,” either. They want corporate CEOs to be held personally responsible for their moral transgressions, to the point of seeing them thrown in jail.
Yeah, those crazy leftists! Doug might want to take a gander at how some of his conservative counterparts have reacted to the decision. The gist of the article, an idiotic thesis MacEachern either pulled out of his ass or heard on Fox News, is that liberals are hypocrites because we want corporations to behave ethically, ergo, we want them to be people too! Neener neener. He also seems to be under the illusion that CEOs can’t currently be prosecuted as individuals for criminal conduct in the course of their jobs. Whatever, the main argument is too stupid to dignify with a rebuttal.
Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
The Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision today in McCullen v Coakley, finding that Massachusetts’ 35 foot buffer zone around abortion clinics violated the free speech rights of protesters to harangue and intimidate uh “counsel” women entering them. It looks like the court bought the plaintiffs’ carefully constructed image of kindly “plump grandmothers” being the typical sort of protesters patients would encounter outside clinics rather than the actual intimidating people known to be there. I’m certain that the Justices weren’t thinking about these people when they rendered their decision.
SCOTUS was concerned about the free “transmission of ideas”.
Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com
Imagine living in a country with same-sex marriage equality, legalized marijuana, and women of childbearing age relegated to ward-of-the-state status because abortion is banned and fertilized eggs have been granted legal status as human beings. If that seems a bit incongruous – a bit one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others to you, then I hope you’re paying careful attention to the Hobby Lobby case.
Read Ian Millhiser’s excellent coverage on the Hobby Lobby oral arguments before the Supreme Court to understand why pro-choice activists are deeply worried about the pending decision.