SCOTUS
Expands Hobby Lobby Ruling To Include ALL Forms of Birth Control
If you thought that the June 30 Supreme Court
ruling on the Hobby
Lobby case was narrow in scope or no big deal, well, you were wrong.
Less than 24 hours after the court handed down
its controversial ruling for Hobby Lobby, the court decided to expand on their
initial decision. On Tuesday the SCOTUS ordered the lower courts to rehear all cases
where corporations wanted to deny coverage for ALL forms of birth control….not
just the four that Hobby Lobby wanted excluded.
Obamacare requires that employers offer
insurance policies which include basic preventative care. And basic
preventative care now includes all contraceptive methods approved by the FDA.
Before Monday’s ruling, under the law, non-profit religious organizations were
exempt from this requirement, but corporations, like Hobby Lobby, were not.
The owners of Hobby Lobby have objected to
Obamacare all along based on this birth control clause because they feel that
it is offensive to their Christian beliefs. They believe that a few of the
approved methods of birth control, like the IUD and the morning after pill, are
actually weapons of murder because they cause abortion, (even while science and research have proven this to be untrue).
So,
they’ve repeatedly said that they do not want any woman who works for them to
be allowed to participate in any kind of insurance program that goes against
their own personal belief system. And Monday the SCOTUS agreed and ruled in
their favor.
Monday’s ruling basically said that Hobby
Lobby doesn’t have to include the morning after pill or IUDs on their insurance
plans. But, the ruling didn’t stop there. It also said that any closely held
company- those with more than half of their stock owned by fewer than 5 people-
do not have to comply with the Obamacare mandate if they object for religious
reasons. And by the way, this actually applies to approximately 90% of all businesses and effects about 52% of the nation’s workforce.
Now, clearly you can see that Monday’s ruling
has the potential to be a very big deal just on its own. But when you add to
that what the court did on Tuesday, it becomes obvious what Ruth Bader Ginsburg
meant when she said that this decision was opening the flood gates. She called
this ruling a “decision of startling breadth.” And she was right.
In her scathing dissent,
Ginsburg actually predicted this outcome when she said,
“Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision.”
“Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be ‘perceived as favoring one religion over another,’ the very ‘risk the [Constitution's] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude.”
Between June 30’s ruling and July 1’s
expansion, this Hobby Lobby decision has opened a giant loophole for claims of
subjective beliefs. And with this one case, the court’s Conservative majority
has essentially said that any religious objection to insurance that covers ANY
kind of preventative care has merit. So no matter how much Alito wants to claim
that this ruling is narrow in scope, the implications of this are enormous.