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.
Probably not those people, anyway. In this case, I think the sentiment is appropriate.
Would you say the same if Party A offered Party B less money for the same amount of work if they’re black? I’d give Party C a call and tell them to sue the hell out of Party A. Fuck Party A.
Yes.
Without the ability to buy government power, the damage any organization can cause is greatly reduced.
Voluntary association among freely consenting individuals.
Party A’s contract at one time did not include workers’ compensation insurance, minimum wages, lunch hours, minimum ages for workers, maximum hours, etc., etc. As Party B was not in a position to protect him/herself from such contracts, or even ensure that he/she would ever be paid, two things happened. Unions–where the Bs could try to equalize the bargaining power–and legislation, where the majority of the populace could indicate what restrictions they felt there ought to be on any such contracts so they don’t simply degenerate into a exploiting Bs because of the inequality of bargaining power.
I have asked this before, Patrick–where do you think the “natural” (and inalienable) rights you believe all human beings have come from?
Patrick,
Such voluntary associations include private posses to enforce perceived rights–but I guess that’s fine with you. Money talks, poverty dies.
This kind of venom doesn’t do anything to advance the conversation. David Green might be Lucifer incarnate, but that doesn’t change the underlying issue that some people, apparently including your good self, want to force him to pay for a form of birth control that violates his personal beliefs.
If you won’t stand up for his rights, however offensive you may find his beliefs, you have no reason to expect anyone to stand up for yours.
I want to force him to pay for lots of things, actually. Roads, schools, mutual defense, pollution clean-up, etc. Many more things than decent insurance for his employees. I want to make you pay for them too–just as I have to.
The whole legal fiction of a corporation that shields individuals from personal responsibility is definitely morally problematic.
Yet employers have the right to force their view on their employer?
Hobby Lobby isn’t forcing anyone to work for them, nor are they preventing any of their employees from using any form of birth control they choose. They are simply refusing to pay for certain types of birth control.
Look at the direction the gun is pointing.
The particular facts of the Hobby Lobby case aren’t the end of the story, Patrick. Your views are inconsistent with any employer being required to provide ANY insurance to anybody–or indeed any citizen from being taxed for any purpose.
Out of the barrel of a gun. Mao didn’t get everything wrong.
I don’t claim that “natural rights” exist in any absolute, objective, or Platonic sense. As a social animal, I find the Golden Rule to be valuable in my interactions with other people.
Because I am part of a species that has evolved empathy, to one degree or another, I am able to see other individuals as people, not as things. Accordingly, I will not initiate force against others in order to achieve my personal goals.
I will use force to defend myself and my family, if necessary, but I would greatly prefer to persuade by evidence and reason. Coercion isn’t just immoral, it’s not the best solution.
That’s too bad. It certainly significantly decreases my desire to aid you when others decide that you should be the subject of force.
Is it really so hard for you to envision voluntary means to achieve your goals?
Yes, yes they are.
I’m off to work to pay those taxes now.
Patrick,
If there are no such things as natural rights, as you concede, there is no reason whatever to insist that such goods as are produced by free speech, free contract, etc., trump all other perceived goods. The empathy you mention a couple of post back also makes it difficult for some people to witness abject poverty in the midst of incredible wealth, or easy to treat ailments that kill people because they can’t afford to pay for those treatments.
When there are conflicting perceptions of the relative importance of conflicting goods, the sensible thing to do is to vote, rather than just say that the ones Patrick prefers always win. That’s the way we do it–even with some of our unfortunate Constitutional constraints. (Now I don’t happen to like the winner-take-all method of voting that is omnipresent in America, but that’s another story. The point is that even our crappy form of democracy is better than the Ayn Randianism you have been endorsing.)
Now go make some money so you can contribute to your society, in addition to your private earnings.
They don’t. What the employee does at home is hardly likely to affect the private life of the employer. However, the actions taken by this employer will most likely affect the private lives of the employees*. There is a built in unequality in this relationship (meaning that the relationship does not work equally both ways – I am having trouble finding the English words I need). Therefore the employer has a greater obligation towards his employees than the other way around – at least, that’s the way it should be. It seem this employer is actually fine with working the skewed relationship between employer/employee to his (religious) advantage.
*) I mean affect in a secular way, in material terms.
In English you could say something like “unequal bargaining power.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_bargaining_power
walto,
The word I was looking for is asymmetry. The employer/employee-relationship has a built-in asymmetry.
I agree.
No, that’s not true.
This is why there’s no point in arguing with libertarians; they simply don’t engage with the real world. IF you – and your little town full of neighbors (your supposed “voluntary association among freely consenting individuals”) – don’t have our mutually-agreed-upon government protecting you, then there is no limit to the harm David Green can cause you. He has 5 billion dollars, you don’t.
He doesn’t need to “buy government power” – why would he – he can just buy all the roads and parks he wants and keep you and all your halfwit friends out with his hired security guards. And you, because you’ve dismantled “big government”, you don’t have tax-paid city planners to write regulations about boring-but-necessary things like land use, you don’t have tax-paid prosecutors to make life difficult for David Green when he oversteps the boundaries, you don’t have tax-paid town cops on your side anymore because David Green isn’t committing fraud or a crime of force – which by your standards is when the government could be justified in interfering with David Green’s exercise of power.
We already know what the world looks like when we dismantle “big government”. It looks like warlords running Somalia. It looks like the parts of Mexico where drug cartels are in power. David Green will fit right in.
And people like you, Patrick, would be happy to hand my country over to power-mad men like David Green, all in the name of freeing David Green from the “burden” of being made to pay for health insurance by the big bad government wolf.
You know, there’s a name in our real world for your supposed “voluntary association among freely consenting individuals” That’s OUR government. I voluntarily associate myself with the rest of my neighbors in choosing our government and we freely consent (well, freely, considering the alternatives) to pay taxes to support the consenting individuals who (for a paycheck) agree to carry out the goals of our association.
Too bad you don’t like our association. That’s no excuse for you aligning yourself with the scum of the earth.
Yes, actually, it does advance the conversation.
It moves the Overton window to make it clear that power-mad men like David Green should be treated as social pariahs, same as we treat KKK men as pariahs, same as we treat child-raping priests as pariahs. There was a time when no one spoke out “with venom” against the KKK, and fortunately our society has improved a little since cross-burnings were just a regrettable but normal fact of life. We’re not there yet with rejecting misogynistic quasi-religious assholes, but if decent people like me continue to speak out against David Green, we can hope to improve our society at least a little.
There is no excuse in a secular society for “religious” beliefs to be privileged above any other kind of belief. There is no excuse for a government which is mandated to treat all citizens equally to give special favor to David Green’s supposed “religious” objection to contraception, and thus let him off the hook of paying for insurance, while the same government denies me my sincerely-held (but non-religious) objection to organ transplants, and thus leaves me on the hook for insurance that will pay for something that truly violates my personal beliefs.
It is beyond stupid for a secular commenter to take the side of religious privilege.
Wrong again. What I’m asking for is equality under the law. It doesn’t even matter that his beliefs are offensive – which they are – what matters is that his beliefs are being given special privileges by the corrupt Catholics on the Supreme Court. I stand up for his rights as long as his rights are the same as mine, not better “rights” because of some hoked-up “religion”.
The only way for a religiously-diverse society (including non-religious people ) to move forward is to treat us all equally.
There can’t be one law for people who claim a certain religion (we WON’T prosecute you for felony child endangerment because those vipers you kept around are for “faith” purposes) and another law for people who don’t claim religion (we WILL prosecute you for felony child endangerment because those vipers you kept around are for “scientific” purposes). There can’t be one insurance mandate for people who claim a certain religion (no insurance payment required from Jehovah’s Witness employers, because the payment will violate their “religious” objection to blood transfusions) and another insurance mandate for people who don’t claim that specific religion (yes, insurance payment required from non-Jehovah’s Witness employers because they have no “religious” objection to blood transfusions, even if they have sincere objections based on something other than that religion).
I stand up for David Green’s rights, but his rights should never be read as being better than mine, or than the JW’s, or the snake-handler’s. Or yours, for that matter. Our society has to be secular. We cannot give any specific sect, nor religion in general, a free pass for misconduct in the name of “religious rights”.
Yep. Exactly.
It’s amazingly simple, isn’t it. We all pay, we all benefit.
Even those of us who have “religious” objections to public schools. Or spiritual objections to a standing army. Or libertarian objections to pollution regulations.
By the way, does this mean that religion has gained influence in the courts?
Well, given the subject of my post, obviously I think religion has gained an undue influence on the Supreme Court.
Some nice secular decisions at lower court levels, though. Same-sex marriage, 10-Commandment monuments needed to be balanced with non-christian and non-religious monuments …
hotshoe,
I don’t get it. They’re supposed to be reasonably intelligent men, these supreme court judges. How can they make such a toe-archingly wrong decision, a decision that clearly protects religious rights at the cost of secular concerns?
hotshoe, my sense is that Patrick will agree with you regarding the importance of treating religious and non-religion-based beliefs in the same manner. His view is that no government should be allowed to force anything contrary to anybody’s beliefs of any kind (except maybe beliefs regarding force and fraud–because those are thought to be more important–though his reason for treating those differently doesn’t make much sense IMO) on anybody.
In other words, he’s not pushing libertarianism for the religious only: he wants it for everyone.
But trading in secular well-being to protect a belief? Hm…
They were appointed by Republicans, because of their support of extreme right-wing ideologies.
Gralgrathor,
Well, if I could put words in Patrick’s mouth, I’m guessing he’d say something like “no one can be safe in any society where one’s life, liberty and property are not protected, so those beliefs are sacrosanct.”
But as he’s already indicated, unlike the “natural law” theorists who had those rights bestowed upon (white, male) humans only by “the Creator,” Patrick takes them to follow from his feelings of empathy. But those feelings provide lots of other kinds of approval and disgust to people with lots of different views on this subject. The result is, if you take away the hifalutin’ Lockean phrases you get, basically, nuttin.
Living in a part of France where communists still stand and get elected to local office and where trying to get anyone to look at issues pragmatically is, shall we say, difficult, the instinct to be self-serving is not limited to the right of politics. I think it is endemic among politicians of all flavours. What can we unimportant little people do about it? We’ll put up with a huge amount of exploitation to avoid chaos. But collectively, little people can effect change. Communication and organisation are key.
And agreeing on what needs to be done!
I readily grant that. Fifty years ago, in the USA, there were crazies on the left and on the right. But today, there are few remaining at the crazy extremes of the left. So it is the crazies on the right that we must be wary of.
I think you’ll find most of the extreme leftists in Europe. No more desirable than the rightists, although I often find the motivations for their aberrant behaviour just the tiniest bit less offensive than that of the rightists. Well, excepting of course national socialism derivates, who should all be shot on sight.
I’m not sure the terms “right” and “left” mean much of anything anymore, actually. There are libertarians, like Patrick, that share anti-tax views with traditional right-wingers and anti-religion views with traditional left-wingers.
FWIW, I’m a single taxer (or LVT proponent), myself, and think the idea of “natural rights’ is silly medieval nonsense, wherever the hell that positions me.
True enough.
Absolute truth. In fact, I don’t get where that’s coming from. The whole of human history has been a journey away from a dependency on the laws of nature. The only reason for promoting such a dependency would be that one finds oneself already in a position of force, and unwilling to relinquish any of it for the greater good.
I completely agree. I’m not sure that they ever meant much.
I fully agree with that too.
I tend to think of myself as a pragmatic centrist. Politics today does not seem to have room for pragmatists.
Well, that’s all great. You’re probably correct that Patrick “wants if for everybody” – which actually would be an unmitigated disaster – but that’s not the problem we’re having right now, right here in the real world. The problem we’re having is that the unholy alliance of money, power, and Catholic Supremes are carving out an unassailable territory of special privilege for their brand of “religious beliefs” while specifically denying everyone else any standing for any kind of “non-religious beliefs” or “Non-standard-christian religious beliefs”. By supporting David Green and his toadies – on the grounds of free speech, or non-force, or whatever it is that Patrick thinks justifies his support – he is supporting the official, legal, government-sanctioned establishment of a two-tier society where both he and I will be permanently consigned to the under tier. Patrick almost certainly doesn’t want that, and almost certainly doesn’t think that his desire for libertarianism – or minarchy, or whatever he calls it – causes that unequal result. But like most passionate libertarians he cannot engage his mind with the real-world consequences of his desires in action.
IF we, like Patrick, accept David Green’s claim that his “religious beliefs” must be respected and not challenged much less overruled by law, the unavoidable consequence is that we must accept our subordinate position, precisely because we don’t own any of those religious beliefs which are being given special treatment. There are more of them than there are of us. They are not on our side and it’s deeply irrational for us to speak on their behalf. Patrick may indeed believe that he is supporting respect for everybody’s beliefs of all kinds, but in the real world what he’s supporting is a specific exemption for them and them only, not for him or me. What a fool to collaborate in the establishment of himself as a second-class citizen.
Finding yourself on the side of power-mad liar David Green is a sure sign that you should re-examine your own principles because, I guarantee, they’ve led you astray somewhere.
I’ve been pretty hard on Patrick, so here’s something nice, in sympathy with what (I think) is a valid part of his worldview:
Happy Fourth of July, y’all.
In the wake of the SCOTUS’s Citizens United decision, a nice idea from Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig — found a SuperPAC for the purpose of ending SuperPACs:
How to use a SuperPAC to kill SuperPACs
The website: https://mayday.us/
(Full disclosure: I am a donor.)
If there are no natural rights and no objective morality, so what if women have been made into second class citizens? So what if religious fanatics make ruling after ruling against non-christians or non-muslims?
Hotshoe offers righteous indignation he/she has no right to over the happenstance arrangements of matter. The ruling is just how physics and evolution happened to play out in this universe. Patrick acts as if the ruling “should” have gone another way, as if physics “should” do something other than what it does.
Is he also angry that alpha males dominate wolf societies? In so many mammalian species, the females are also second class cititizen. So what?
I think Professor Ilya Somin provides a more measured consideration of the Hobby Lobby ruling in Hobby Lobby and the legal rights of people organized as corporations published in the Washington Post.
However objectionable some might find the religious views of the owners of Hobby Lobby, they are entitled to act in accordance with them on grounds of religious freedom provided that they do no harm to others. In this case, there seems to be no compelling reason why they should be forced to act in contravention of those beliefs. The women employed by such corporations are not being denied any and all access to birth control. The various methods of contraception can be obtained or provided by other means. Under those circumstances, I think SCOTUS reached a sound conclusion.
Seversky,
I don’t think they are being forced to act in contravention of their beliefs. They’re simply being asked to pay insurance premiums. It’s up to their employees to decide what forms of contraception to use. The choice and the moral responsibility rests with the employees, not with the corporate owners.
Hobby Lobby pays its employees’ salaries, despite the fact that they can use those salaries in ways that the owners would not condone. Why should insurance premiums be any different?
William,
Don’t you get bored raising the same objections again and again, ignoring our rebuttals each time?
As a hypothetical, suppose you are a business owner with a strong moral objection to pornography. Not being stuipid, you know full well a number of your employees are likely to use some of their wages to buy pornography. You don’t like it but what they do with their pay is their business. But suppose, in the hothouse of Washington politics, some Congresscritters, for reasons best known to themselves, have a law passed which requires all employers to offer a subscription to a pornographic website as part of their terms and conditions of employment. As an employer, feeling as you do, you could quite reasonably object to being forced to do something to which you object so strongly, particularly if there are plenty of other ways your employees can satisfy their cravings using their own money.
So, if there are no natural rights and no objective morality there’s nothing to stop us working these things out for ourselves, is there? Isn’t that exactly
SeverskyP35,
what you’ve done?
How did that get in there?
SeverskyP35, why, in your view, is contributing to employers’ insurance premiums more like providing them with a pornographic website than it is like offering an increased salary component that must be spent on employee healthcare? A better analogy would be, I think, to suppose that Congress decides that everybody should have a basic cable package, and the package they came up with includes a pornographic channel. I guess In my own view, what should happen in that case, is that that citizens should lobby congress to remove that channel from the package or to make a cable voucher instead of a particular package, or something else along those lines. But I would not be in favor of each employer knocking out channels they’re uncomfortable with. One would take out Lifetime, another Spike, another (who disapproves of boxing) ESPN, one CSN, another Fox, etc., etc. Such an arrangement forgets why we have a Congress in the first place, and gives some employees crap at the whim of their bosses.
BTW, here’s an old fable of mine that I think Patrick and other libertarians will enjoy about the dangers of corporations getting too cozy with governments:
Edit: BTW, it’s a Roman à clef, for any of you who are familiar with Mass. politics.
That’s not the same thing at all.
If the employees were to be offered magazine subscriptions, and porn magazines were among the choice, then that might be analogous. But you have made it porn-only, which is very different.
This is a truly stupid analogy to the health insurance payments. You could have proposed an honest analogy with, say, our government requiring employers to provide subscriptions to an educational video service, of which less than 1% was protested as objectionable by the employer, the rest being admittedly wholesome and helpful for all, and even that tiny% is only a problem if the employer lies about the content, pretending it’s “pornography” when it’s really documentaries about classic paintings and statues.
Then the employer goes on to lie about feeling oppressed if we even attempt to discuss the facts about his objections, to point out that studies show it’s not pornography, it’s documentaries. Then somehow he gets the Supreme Court to agree that any discussion of facts is an unlawful burden on his personal belief, so that not only is he excused from obeying the law equally with all other citizens, we’re not even allowed to question him about why he thinks he shouldn’t have to obey. Now, if that’s what you had written, that would be an accurate useful analogy to the David Green situation.
Why would any rational person take David Green’s side when it’s so clear how bad he is, if you give an honest analogy to what he’s cooked up here?
But even taking your stupid analogy seriously for the sake of argument, I still say: too bad, suck it, employer. Our government makes me do lots of things that I hate far worse than your imaginary employer hates imaginary pornography. And I do them, not cheerfully, but voluntarily, because the alternative is worse. I don’t mean just the alternative that I might be fined/jailed or even shot by a trigger happy DEA man – I mean the alternative that our civil society falls apart when each one of us gets to choose our own idiosyncratic set of laws to obey (on non-factual grounds of belief, no less!). The alternative, if your analogy held up, is the uncivil society where the majority christians get to choose which group(s) to make into second-class citizens, because the strength of their doctrine/beliefs will inspire them to refuse to obey any secular laws which protect our equal rights.
The only thing that protects the rest of us, the non-christians, is the fact that up till now we have lived in a sane nation which does not let christians opt out of laws on the spurious grounds of “religious beliefs”.
There is no argument which could make that pick-your-own-law society acceptable to rational people. If you think there is, you’ve been fooled by the christian liars.
This is relevant 😛
Thanks, Cuttlefish.
more verses
Neil Rickert,
Still way off. Pornography vs. something that can potentially save lives from being ruined. Some analogy.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Br3Uf-wCUAACVm8.png
Hah–there are now “religious rights” not to fill out forms!
Disputing whether or not the provision of access to pornography was a good analogy for the provision of access to birth control in the Hobby Lobby case is a distraction from the real issues in my view. If someone has a better analogy, then be my guest. It’s not worth arguing about.
The two fundamental questions were, first, whether or not corporations could have religious views that are entitled to protection under the First Amendment and, second, if so, did that mean that the owners of Hobby Lobby could not be compelled to provide access to contraception, even though only indirectly through a health insurance plan, if they believed it was wrong to do so according to the tenets of their faith.
On the first question, my initial reaction was that it was nonsense to afford a commercial entity like a corporation the same rights as are granted to individuals. Rights in a society are the entitlements of the individual members of that society, nothing else. We hold, for example, that an individual has the right to life but do we believe the same of a corporation? Having said that and quoting from the article by Professor Somin I quoted previously, I thought Justice Alito, writing the majority opinion, made a persuasive case for corporate rights:
The second question is whether or not the owners of Hobby Lobby are entitled, as a free exercise of their religious beliefs, to refuse to pay for health insurance that includes the provision of birth control. Whether we agree with those beliefs or not is irrelevant. The question is under what circumstances is government entitled to compel them to act in contravention of those beliefs, bearing in mind that we grant protection to the beliefs of those we disagree with to ensure that our own freedom to believe and practice as we choose is afforded similar protection. Here, I think Professor Somin, from the same article I quoted earlier, puts it well:
For what it’s worth, I hold myself to be both agnostic and atheist in the Bertrand Russell sense, philosophically agnostic but atheist in practice. I do not agree with the religious beliefs of the owners of Hobby Lobby but we are are well advised to defend their right to hold them, provided that the exercise of those beliefs does not harm others.
Allowing them to refuse to pay for contraception does not substantially harm women’s rights as there are plenty of other ways in which women can obtain or be provided with birth control agents. Neither does it make women second-class citizens if, as I assume, the owners of Hobby Lobby are refusing to pay for male contraceptives just as much as female.