I’m not going to go over the minutiae of the decision because you can get that everywhere else. I want to go through a few points I find interesting.
As you know, SCOTUS decided that "closely held" (meaning privately owned) for profit corporations don’t have to offer contraception if doing so goes against their "sincerely held beliefs". This actually changes nothing (not even for employees of Hobby Lobby) so if your hair was on fire, you can calm down now. The court specifically referred to the "exception" that HHS gave to certain religious organizations. I had to do some searching to make sure I remembered the outcome of that correctly (I did). Basically, the company is no longer paying for contraceptive care. It is specifically excluded from coverage under the plan documents but the insurance companies have agreed to absorb the costs. Nothing changes and everyone has access to contraception. I found all of this to be boring and of little relevance.
Here’s what I thought was interesting; I didn’t count, but it felt to me that the decision used the words "corporate personhood" more than it did "religious beliefs". Roberts and his cabal had an agenda here. They were really looking to take the next step in cementing corporations into personhood status. They played the religious right for rubes so that they could, once again, advance the interests of their corporate masters.
Why do I say that? Because they explicitly gave the Jahovah’s Witnesses and the Christian Scientists the middle finger in this part of the decision;
This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.
They don’t give two shits about anyone’s religious beliefs. If they did care about "sincerely held religious beliefs", they wouldn’t have explicitly crapped on other religions.
This tells me that something bigger, badder, and uglier than what we’ve seen thus far is in the corporate personhood horizon for us.
This was not about religion and it was not about Hobby Lobby. This was about Monsanto, GE, Boeing, Goldman Sachs and Pfizer.
The other part of the decision that I found interesting was this;
The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients.
It’s interesting because it acknowledges that those forms of contraception are not abortifacients. The court basically said that they don’t care about the facts or the science. If an employer is living in a fucking fantasyland where the morning after pill has any effect at all on a fertilized egg, they can do that and the Supreme Court won’t do a damned thing to correct that lie.
Believe it or not, this was exactly what I expected they would do.
