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The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

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Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

LynahFan said:
Yeah, because nobody has ever denied essential care to another person because of religious views. It's especially never happened to a close, loved family member such as a child, so it would definitely never happen to an unrelated employee...

Oh, wait: http://www.masskids.org/index.php?option=com_content&id=161&Itemid=165

Zealots who would deny essential care to their own children would definitely deny it to their employees if given the chance - that's not even a slope, it's just a cliff.
Click to expand...

I appreciate Bob's faith in humanity but I agree, the potential for misuse that this opens up is enormous. Any company owner given a path to reduce benefits by millions of dollars is going to be seriously tempted to go that route.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

LynahFan said:
Yeah, because nobody has ever denied essential care to another person because of religious views. It's especially never happened to a close, loved family member such as a child, so it would definitely never happen to an unrelated employee...

Oh, wait: http://www.masskids.org/index.php?option=com_content&id=161&Itemid=165

Zealots who would deny essential care to their own children would definitely deny it to their employees if given the chance - that's not even a slope, it's just a cliff.
Click to expand...
And I think there's broad consensus among most people that such things shouldn't happen. Drawing such lines in real life over time is messy of course.

Which of course again is a far flung tangent from Obama's zeal to force businesses to provide free contraception to employees.

Or is the existing exemption, in Obamacare, on this very issue for religious groups some horrible travesty? :rolleyes: I mean, people do realize that this exemption is already in existence for many other groups, and the earth hasn't imploded or anything? If it's such a horrible thing to contemplate, I'd suggest people who have such thoughts should campaign to yank the exemption from the Catholic Church, etc. But, of course it's not some horrible thing, unless you're a spinmeister extraordinaire.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

Rover said:
I appreciate Bob's faith in humanity but I agree, the potential for misuse that this opens up is enormous. Any company owner given a path to reduce benefits by millions of dollars is going to be seriously tempted to go that route.
Click to expand...
My faith in humanity declines proportionately to the amount of time I spend around here.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

Bob Gray said:
Which of course again is a far flung tangent from Obama's zeal to force businesses to provide free contraception to employees.
Click to expand...

Yeah, how dare he want health insurance companies to actually give women proper health care options. What a socialist jerk.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

Bob Gray said:
And I think there's broad consensus among most people that such things shouldn't happen. Drawing such lines in real life over time is messy of course.

Which of course again is a far flung tangent from Obama's zeal to force businesses to provide free contraception to employees.

Or is the existing exemption, in Obamacare, on this very issue for religious groups some horrible travesty? :rolleyes: I mean, people do realize that this exemption is already in existence for many other groups, and the earth hasn't imploded or anything? If it's such a horrible thing to contemplate, I'd suggest people who have such thoughts should campaign to yank the exemption from the Catholic Church, etc. But, of course it's not some horrible thing, unless you're a spinmeister extraordinaire.
Click to expand...

The exemption still exists. What people are asking for is beyond the pale.
 
Rover said:
Tell me, what religion does Wal-Mart, GE, Apple and Exxon practice? Do we take a vote of all the shareholders to declare a preference for a certain denomination?
Click to expand...

No vote necessary. They all worship at the altar of the almighty dollar.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

While it can be fun to breathlessly hyperventilate over ever-more extreme hypotheticals, when we get back to the actual case at hand, we notice it is particularly circumscribed:
-- the issue is not even a statute: it is a non-statutory regulation promulgated by HHS. The Court wouldn’t be “overturning” anything to rule in favor of Hobby Lobby / Conestoga Wood. They merely would be saying “on this one technical detail of this one technical regulation, you went a bit too far.”
-- HHS has already provided the requested “freedom of conscience” exemption to other “corporations” in similar situations. Those were explicitly religious, this one is implicitly religious
-- there are easily-identified individuals as owners of these companies with long-established track records regarding their beliefs and values. Clearly no one is trying to "game the system." If anything, they are declining to drop insurance coverage and pay the fine, which would be cheaper.
-- Roberts took a lot of heat for appearing to cave in the face of pressure the last time PPACA was before The Court. Here is a chance for him to appear to have a spine, with nothing substantive at stake.

The ruling will be so technical and so narrow that it will have no precedential value whatsoever. You won’t be able to extrapolate anything from it. Another agency was a bit overzealous in its rule-making. Yawn.

What are the chances that Breyer agrees to vote with the majority in exchange for the opportunity to draft the opinion as narrowly as he possibly can?
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

Not sure how one would breathlessly hyperventilate, but the AIDS thing isn't that far-fetched. It was de facto policy of the United State in the Reagan years to say AIDS was a plague sent by God to punish the gays. It would follow that it would be against the corporation's religion to treat plagues sent by God. For that matter, the tumor in my head was caused by a random mutation - there is no medical reason for it to have happened - was that a punishment from God? In retrospect should my employer, or their insurance company, refused treatment because they don't cover "acts of God"?

However, the idea of a corporation having religion does raise a question. Perhaps it has been raised elsewhere, maybe on this board but I have missed it, but if a corporation is a person with religion, does it also have a soul? Granted, I could be wrong, but I think popular Christian dogma is that Christ died on the cross for our sins - to save our souls, as it were. So corporations have souls? So how do mergers work? Does the soul disappear? Go to heaven? Or does it join with the soul of the new corporation to create some sort of super soul? I'm genuinely curious.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

ScoobyDoo said:
The exemption still exists. What people are asking for is beyond the pale.
Click to expand...
So the exemption, as it exists is beyond the pale? What Hobby Lobby is opposed to is actually more narrow in scope than the existing exemption.

Now go back to your breathless hyperventilating.
 
FreshFish said:
While it can be fun to breathlessly hyperventilate over ever-more extreme hypotheticals, when we get back to the actual case at hand, we notice it is particularly circumscribed:
-- the issue is not even a statute: it is a non-statutory regulation promulgated by HHS. The Court wouldn’t be “overturning” anything to rule in favor of Hobby Lobby / Conestoga Wood. They merely would be saying “on this one technical detail of this one technical regulation, you went a bit too far.”
-- HHS has already provided the requested “freedom of conscience” exemption to other “corporations” in similar situations. Those were explicitly religious, this one is implicitly religious
-- there are easily-identified individuals as owners of these companies with long-established track records regarding their beliefs and values. Clearly no one is trying to "game the system." If anything, they are declining to drop insurance coverage and pay the fine, which would be cheaper.
-- Roberts took a lot of heat for appearing to cave in the face of pressure the last time PPACA was before The Court. Here is a chance for him to appear to have a spine, with nothing substantive at stake.

The ruling will be so technical and so narrow that it will have no precedential value whatsoever. You won’t be able to extrapolate anything from it. Another agency was a bit overzealous in its rule-making. Yawn.

What are the chances that Breyer agrees to vote with the majority in exchange for the opportunity to draft the opinion as narrowly as he possibly can?
Click to expand...

Now you're just acting like a first year law student and throwing shiat at the wall hoping something sticks in June. Did you just watch the Paperchase or something?
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

And, of course, this all goes back to the absolute ridiculousness of tying health insurance to employment. Why don't we just put it on our cable providers. Make them provide health insurance to us. There is no more immoral group of companies than that. Shouldn't run into any religious objections.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

Priceless said:
However, the idea of a corporation having religion does raise a question.
Click to expand...

Do you mean religious organizations that take on a not-for-profit corporate form? Like hospitals, schools, and the like?

No one ever claimed that corporations "have" religion (unless it is a "straw man" argument, and of course you would never do that, right?). It is the other way around. For any entity to have a permanence that goes beyond its human founders, it needs to be organized in some form prescribed by the secular government so that it can open bank accounts, pay its employees' salaries, own real estate, etc. etc. It might be organized as a trust, or it might be organized as a corporation. The terminology can be confusing....there are 501(c)etc groups of various sorts.

So if a group of imams or rabbis or ministers or priests found an organization, then that organization is recognized to have a religious exemption? but if a devout family founds an organization that operates in a manner consistent with their values, that organization is denied a religious exemption? what if those family members then get ordained? yada yada yada.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS IV: Gays, Guns, and Immigrants, OH MY!

SJHovey said:
And, of course, this all goes back to the absolute ridiculousness of tying health insurance to employment.
Click to expand...

!


which, of course, is a long-term unintended consequence of a different form of well-intentioned short-term government meddling.....put in place on a "temporary" basis to meet an "emergency" situation, which of course was then never unwound once the emergency had passed.....


and so we reach our customary impasse: "we meant well" and "what are the actual real-life consequences of those 'good intentions'?" talking past each other yet again....
 
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