contraceptives

Express Your Dissent!

It is unbelievable that in 2014
we are still fighting about women’s
access to basic health care like birth control.

If you agree — say so. Just click here now
to add your name to the dissent.
— Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood

Photo by James Palinsad Flickr/creative commons

Photo by James Palinsad
Flickr/creative commons

In a dramatic 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court today chose to side with corporations over people and set a brand new (and untested) precedent that is just the starting gun for more and more corporations claiming religious freedom superiority over the needs of their employees.

(See a LATE BREAKING UPDATE at the bottom showing the already cascading effect this decision is having in the lower courts, in less than 8 hours.) 

In Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the right-wing justices vacated a portion of the Affordable Care Act that applies to certain for-profit corporations, giving them superior religious freedom rights. They performed this bit of surgery with a dull hack saw. In the the process they perpetuated a fatal misunderstanding of the difference between pregnancy prevention and abortion.

Protecting the free-exercise rights of closely held corporations thus protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control them. — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito

It was a good day to be a boss. And a very good day for all the lawyers who will now thrive because of the havoc this decision will fuel. 

Justice Stephen Breyer and the 3 women Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayer, and Elana Kagan, dissented in consideration of the tens of thousands of working women who are now unable to exercise their religious freedom, or more bluntly, freedom from the religious freedom of others with whom they disagree. Ginsburg called it, “A decision of startling breadth,” and went on to say . . .

The Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood . . . invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith . . . The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield . . .

The longstanding, extreme right-wingnuts’ campaign to dismantle any gains in reproductive freedom is driven solely by their theocratic fundamentalist beliefs that dictate that women shouldn’t control their own bodies, or shouldn’t be wanting to have sex in the first place, and that pregnancy prevention amounts to another form of abortion. Their position is that discrimination against women health care is not discrimination at all — it’s okay for your bosses to know better what you need.

Now it’s up to the Congress to provide a contraceptive work-around, if possible. For now, however, working women have to pay twice, first by their labor which entitles them to health care, and then separately outside of their company’s health care program. For example, a working woman now must pay more than $1000 for a IUD, an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy, in many cases equal to a month’s pay.

There is an irony here because less available contraception will result in more pregnancies which are even more expensive and more of a strain on women’s overall health and their economic opportunities.

This impasse is a perfect example of an inhumane and coercive system that must be replaced with a humane and voluntary association outside of the influence of governments, corporations, and religious hierarchies. Shall birth control, including abortion, be a matter for the growing theocracy or be a matter between a woman and her health care providers? See A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom to understand why VenusPlusX believes issues like these are of supreme importance.

Join us and Planned Parenthood in expressing your dissent so together we can do everything possible to protect and defend women’s health and rights nationwide.

Related . . .

— A possible (very slim) silver lining in today’s ruling

— Some equally bad decisions this session:  McCullen v Coakley, stripping buffer zones at women’s clinics; and, today’s weakening of unions, and the worker benefits they sponsor with Harris v Quinn

— Two very good decisions: Protecting personal privacy in Riley v California Rulingand denying cert rejecting challenge to California’s law banning gay sex therapy.

— When Will We Move to Impeach Certain Supreme Court Justices, Part 1 and Part 2

— When Free Speech Becomes Sedition

— How Right-wing Nuts are Actually Helping Progressives

UPDATE from SCOTUSblogActing swiftly in the wake of the Court’s ruling on Monday, and relying directly upon that decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday blocked all enforcement of the mandate against an Alabama Catholic TV network, a non-profit entity. Dozens of cases similar to Hobby Lobby are in the pipeline and now sure to be viewed with more favor.

 

 

 

Op-Ed: . .Tis The Season of Love . . . and Not-of Love

También En Español.


Which will you choose for 2012? Will you commit yourself to the power and supremacy of love? Will you check yourself to make sure your actions are “of love?” Are you willing to call out those who are not-of love?

The stark realities and compounding errors of the feckless conspiracy of the greedy and the stupid are in sharp relief. These realities become clearer, bolder, and more desperate by the hour, with no exit strategy that doesn’t involve even greater hardship to the rest of us who own this earth. Who are the humane and the inhumane? Who are those “of love” and who are those “not-of love?” It’s easy to spot each camp. People cannot help showing which side they are on by the commitments and actions of their everyday life.

Our task is to co-create a world free from the bondage of a few. The few, let’s call them an aged, economically privileged, mostly entirely white, and corrupt. They are a small group, roughly .005% of the world’s population. They are characterized by their own polarizing fear of anything “other,” and naturally devolve to attacks at the intersection of race and sexuality because these two things so obviously threaten their ragged, useless paradigm that has brought nothing but social and economic injustice to the entire planet.

These folks are the ones in need of serious re-education. Movements such as Occupy Everything is doing a sterling service by pointing out this dislocation of world resources and the income disparities that are dismantling otherwise benign and serviceable institutions. For the first time in history enough people are mobilized throughout the world to flip that script once and for all, while the insane inanity of the now lock-step radical right, led by a new and rather freaky breed of (irreligious) American fundamentalists, is doing its part to speed along the process of their eventual demise.

Start with governments, “the state.” Governments are instruments of the people, and have an important role in maximizing the efficient uses of our collective resources, and in guaranteeing education and equalizing opportunity. An ideal government would have as its motto, “Privilege For All,” and carry on policy, programming, and administration to make that possible. Gone will be the most coercive arm of the state, the military, an end to the horrible choice given young people, unemployment or lack of tuition versus enlisting to fill body bags of endless asymmetrical wars aimed at justifying huge government budgets. That’s wrong, obscene.

Why must the state interfere with our reproductive rights? A private relationship between a patient and her physician is a precise example of the type of voluntary association that replaces its current coercive system that leads to nothing but heartache and more social and economic dislocation.

Why can’t teenagers have access to birth control? Condoms are more widely accessible, but why are teenage girls prevented from getting the morning after pill if they choose? The American fundamentalists driving governments insist that this is killing a . . . a what? a zygote?

“Personhood” proselytizers would have you believe that life begins at the moment of conception, when (the) sperm fertilizes (the) egg, and anything or more correctly, anyone, interfering with that “life” is guilty of a poorly thought through illegality. But they haven’t thought this through at all. The personhood laws would make every female guilty of infanticide every month because menstruation discharges those “eggs” that failed to attach. Shall we look all women up for their pre-existing condition that calls them monthly murderers? It make no sense and laws like these perforce are destined to the gooey dustbin of failed attempts to control people’s destiny.

These are just a few headline examples demonstrating how easy it is to separate out the haters among us. With the upcoming election, as crazy laws make their way through right wing controlled state legislatures, as mean-spirited Republican candidates spread their vitriol, it should be easier and easier for us to isolate and eradicate the draconians among us.

We have to have courage and call them out at every turn, and women are leading the way. Everyone, including men, comprising our 99.095% must join in to bring about a season “of love.”