The Hobby Lobby decision has a lot of people spooked, and for good reason. The short and nasty version is that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the company's ability to use ObamaCare as their insurance, but they were able to get an exemption: They did not need to pay for four means of contraception. Although the ruling should have a narrow effect, that is it only effects a very specific situation, a lot of people are worried it can have a broader effect. The good news is that a lot of the worry is for naught.
There are three interesting points that people seem to bring up a lot that show just how little they paid attention in civics. The first is that people feel that the Supreme Court needs to worry about popular opinion. That's part of the reason that they are hired for life; that gives them the freedom to know that no matter how unpopular their decision is there can be no political ramifications. This allows them to make those unpopular decisions as they are required, and especially when someone else would have to worry about the political ramifications for making that decision. It's a hard job, but that ability to ignore politics is a major advantage.
The other is that the belief that the concept of corporations as "people" is a recent one. It is a legal fiction that has been around since the 14th Century and serves a number of important functions, not the least of which is to provide a continuity of contracts; if not for that fiction then contracts would get really weird. The problem is that when corporations get in trouble they can't be sent to jail, but they can be fined; sending a corporation to jail sounds like a great idea, but that would mean sentencing the people on the line as well as the executives, so it sort of sucks.
The last is that legal definitions can be different than medical definitions. The basic reason is politicians are not medical doctors; as such they tend to go for a more general definition than a physician would. The best example of this is how the RU238 pill works in regard to an abortion. From a medical perspective it does not qualify as an abortion as it stops a pregnancy before it really becomes a pregnancy; from a legal perspective, however, it is an abortion as it stops a fertilized egg from becoming a viable child. For a group that can get truly pedantic, these issues crop up all too often.
That said, the decision itself is not only only narrow, but can be fixed with the proper legislation. The decision was based on a loophole put in place by Republican conservatives to allow privately-owned companies to opt out of contraceptives that they saw as causing abortion. Although it has been mentioned that companies could therefore ignore policies that go against the religious beliefs of its owners, such as blood transfusions, the reality is that is an unlikely scenario at best; most of those scenarios have been dealt with at the local level and are unlikely to need to be dealt with again.
In short, a woman still has control over her body, she just may have to pay for some of the contraceptives. Roe v. Wade has not been overturned, by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, for now, the religious rights of company owners have been respected. Other insurance carriers can insure the contraceptives, and publically-held companies are required to insure them as well, so this is not necessarily a step backwards for equal rights so much as it a stagger. However, a minor change in the legislation can easily fix the issue, and that actually be seen sometime in the next year or so.
There are three interesting points that people seem to bring up a lot that show just how little they paid attention in civics. The first is that people feel that the Supreme Court needs to worry about popular opinion. That's part of the reason that they are hired for life; that gives them the freedom to know that no matter how unpopular their decision is there can be no political ramifications. This allows them to make those unpopular decisions as they are required, and especially when someone else would have to worry about the political ramifications for making that decision. It's a hard job, but that ability to ignore politics is a major advantage.
The other is that the belief that the concept of corporations as "people" is a recent one. It is a legal fiction that has been around since the 14th Century and serves a number of important functions, not the least of which is to provide a continuity of contracts; if not for that fiction then contracts would get really weird. The problem is that when corporations get in trouble they can't be sent to jail, but they can be fined; sending a corporation to jail sounds like a great idea, but that would mean sentencing the people on the line as well as the executives, so it sort of sucks.
The last is that legal definitions can be different than medical definitions. The basic reason is politicians are not medical doctors; as such they tend to go for a more general definition than a physician would. The best example of this is how the RU238 pill works in regard to an abortion. From a medical perspective it does not qualify as an abortion as it stops a pregnancy before it really becomes a pregnancy; from a legal perspective, however, it is an abortion as it stops a fertilized egg from becoming a viable child. For a group that can get truly pedantic, these issues crop up all too often.
That said, the decision itself is not only only narrow, but can be fixed with the proper legislation. The decision was based on a loophole put in place by Republican conservatives to allow privately-owned companies to opt out of contraceptives that they saw as causing abortion. Although it has been mentioned that companies could therefore ignore policies that go against the religious beliefs of its owners, such as blood transfusions, the reality is that is an unlikely scenario at best; most of those scenarios have been dealt with at the local level and are unlikely to need to be dealt with again.
In short, a woman still has control over her body, she just may have to pay for some of the contraceptives. Roe v. Wade has not been overturned, by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, for now, the religious rights of company owners have been respected. Other insurance carriers can insure the contraceptives, and publically-held companies are required to insure them as well, so this is not necessarily a step backwards for equal rights so much as it a stagger. However, a minor change in the legislation can easily fix the issue, and that actually be seen sometime in the next year or so.
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