Thoughts? Okay, here goes....
Yay, hopefully someone reasonable will reply to my post, even if they disagree.
The destination of the Hobby Lobby's employees' 401k investments aren't being argued in front of the SCOTUS. Nor is "hypocrisy" being argued.
Agreed, although irrelevant. If you look at the original post, I mention only in passing that this might have a negligible impact, if any at all, on the SCOTUS decision. My post is more referenced to the rest of us who aren't sitting on the nation's highest court, and how we spend our dollars when looking to buy arts and crafts. If you want to do so at a store that is religiously based, are you going to do so at Hobby Lobby, knowing that they don't take steps to ensure that their 401(k) dollars don't go to support companies who invest in this type of research and benefit from the sale and use of these products. In my case, I am ardently opposed to guns, and I steer clear of any store that sells guns on its premises, if I can avoid it.
But I have to give Mother Jones credit for their tenacity. This case has them in a tailspin. Last week the claim was the 4 drugs that HL objects to don't even cause abortions and the FDA labels were wrong.
Oh, God, another one? Look, let's get this straight. IUD's and Plan-B contraceptives are not abortion causing drugs, as least not under US law and regulations. We can have that debate if you wish, but until you change the law itself, the drugs are considered preventive contraception, not abortion-inducing drugs. If you actually look at how they work, the IUD's never allow the egg to come in contact with sperm (thus conception never happens), and the plan-B contraceptive prevents the fertilized egg from implanting in the placenta, thereby causing a natural miscarriage before the fertilized egg (at this stage, still a 1-cell organism) has a chance to even develop the capacity to hold religious beliefs or experience pain.
Ultimately the SCOTUS judges will have to decide if HL has made a case against the coverage of the 4 contraceptives in question, nothing more, nothing less.
Under the law, there is nothing different between those four drugs and other forms of available contraception. Your moral beliefs are yours to define (as are mine), but as a society we adhere to a secular standard that prevents the transmission of religious biases into codified law. And, to be quite honest, that is not even the question pending before the court. The question pending is whether a corporation, as a distinct legal entity from its owners and stockholders, has religious rights, the same as citizens do. I could go for hours talking about how a decision for Hobby Lobby would hamstring boardrooms all across the US (which is quite likely why exactly zero amicus briefs have been filed by US businesses on behalf of Hobby Lobby), but suffice it to say that a decision for Hobby Lobby would pierce the corporate veil, potentially destroying one of the biggest benefits of corporate ownership of a business.
