supreme court

How do you like your Hobby Lobby now, Doug Ducey and other GOP candidates?

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Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com

hobby lobby

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.

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Sweet Lord why did I read MacEachern’s column on Hobby Lobby?

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

leonardo

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.

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But what if I want to show people how much I “care” about them as they’re trying to get into the voting booth?

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

clinic protesters

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”.

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Women’s lives aren’t an olive branch for a truce in the culture wars

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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.

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What happened to not wanting to subsidize people’s sex lives?

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After spending most of the morning being deluged with tweets by an angry anti-choice man letting me know that birth control is wrong and unnatural (as he typed his words into a computer in a climate controlled room), I see that the Supreme Court has ruled that school vouchers, that is public tax dollars for tuition, are legal in Arizona (and presumably everywhere else) even if they are for religious schools.

On paper, the lawsuit dealt only with a small-scale version of vouchers, one enacted in 2011 for students with special needs.

But the decision effectively ratifies the decision of lawmakers to expand eligibility to any student enrolled in a school rated D or F.

Potentially more significant, it removes any legal hurdle from a legislative effort this year to remove virtually all limits on who can get a voucher. A bill to do just that is awaiting a House vote.

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