Hobby Lobby GoalPat Begley [click to enlarge]"If a private company can take its own religious beliefs and say you can't have access to certain health care, it's a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them."-- National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) ExecutiveDirector Rea Carey, to the Washington Post (see below)"[A] coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights said in a joint statement that they also would be withdrawing support [for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)]. The bill’s religious exemptions clause is written so broadly that 'ENDA's discriminatory provision, unprecedented in federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, could provide religiously affiliated organizations -- including hospitals, nursing homes and universities -- a blank check to engage in workplace discrimination against LGBT people,' the group said, adding later that if ENDA were to pass Congress, 'the most important federal law for the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community in American history would leave too many jobs, and too many LGBT workers, without protection.' "-- from "Gay rights groups withdraw support of ENDA after HobbyLobby decision," on washingtonpost.com's "Post Politics" blogby KenSammy "The Hammer" Alito lied his putrid guts out to worm his way onto the Supreme Court, and I guess he decided that since it worked then, there isn't any reason for him ever to tell the truth.Not that anyone should be surprised, but as the fallout from his (in)famous Hobby Lobby ruling falls out, it turns out that just about everything in the ruling was a lie except the part where it says, or implies that if you're a God-fearing far-right-wing Christian corporation that feels your religious liberty is being encroached upon by federal law, just come to the Supreme Court and we'll take care of you, 24/7.For some reason, ultra-radical right-wing ideologues don't seem to like being thought of as "extreme," in kind of the way that obvious and virulent racists have kittens when they're called racists. This is the only reason I can think of why The Hammer felt obliged to pretend in the Hobby Lobby ruling that it would have only the tiniest sliver of applicability, so slim as to be barely worth discussing.In the first place, he told us, the opportunity for nonprofit corporations to claim religious exemption from the contraceptive provisions of ACA-mandated insurance coverage would be oh-so-limited, to just a tiny number of "closely held" (and therefore, we were clearly meant to assume, small) companies that could show centuries of deeply held corporate religious convictions. In the second place, this tiny new window of corporate religious exemption would apply only to this narrow issue of contraceptive means thought by this handful of divinely inspired profit-makers to be objectionable for possibly being abortion-producing.April Fool's! Or July, or whatever kind of fools we are for paying attention to a raging ideologue's transparent lies.(For the record, there was a less obvious lie that didn't come to the fore until three days later. The Hobby Lobby ruling's invention of this new corporate religious exemption was based on the Court majority's assertion that it could be easily applied, since the Obama administration had already worked out an admirable system for granting legally established religious exemptions for non-profit institutions. On Thursday, however, the Court majority granted injunctive relief to Illinois's Wheaton College, which claimed among other things that those very procedures which the Court had found so admirable on Monday had by Thursday become potentially unacceptable.)In the first instance, since there were already, what?, a hundred or so corporations lined up with Hobby Lobby in demanding their corporate religious exemption, the notion that its applicability was an out-and-out lie on the face of it -- it seems obvious that this already large group was, and was meant to be, merely the tip of the iceberg. It would be more accurate to say, as I did in the title for my post on the High Court's Wheaton College whopper three days later: "The Supreme Court opens a drive-through window for right-wing zealots with (right-wing Christian) corporate religious objections to the law."(Of course Justice Sammy didn't specify the part I put in parentheses: that the newly concocted corporate religious exemption applied only to far-right-wing Christians. For that, you have to know how to interpret the winks of the blink-blinkety-blink Court's reigning far-right-wing majority. But as a practical matter, if you're a corporation that has religious convictions of other than the far-right-wing Christian kind and you want to see what the Supreme Court might be willing to do for you, I would suggest that you save yourself the legal fees.)And as to the second instance, the bald claim that the new corporate religious exemption applies only to this contraception-abortion gray area . . . well, for Pete's sake! Is there anyone so foolish as to have failed to notice that this was asserted with no backup or foundation of any sort? When the High Court begins to dish out future corporate religious exemptions, there's nothing here that they'll even have to overturn -- this is just words, words that don't mean a darned thing. AS WE LEARN WITH THE CRUMBLING OF ENDALest anyone think I'm being merely theoretical here, we already have the first major reverberation from The Hammer's Hobby Lobby lies. As the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe reported late this afternoon:
Several major gay rights groups withdrew support Tuesday for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would bolster gay and transgender rights in the workplace, saying they fear that broad religious exemptions included in the current bill might compel private companies to begin citing objections similar to those that prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case last week. . . .[T]he groups said they can no longer back ENDA as currently written in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down a key part of President Obama’s health-care law. The court ruled that family-owned businesses do not have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the owners’ religious beliefs. . . .Signs of crumbling support for ENDA came first Tuesday from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, one of several gay rights group that has aggressively pushed Obama to expand gay rights through executive action since the start of his presidency.Rea Carey, the group's executive director, said in an interview that “If a private company can take its own religious beliefs and say you can't have access to certain health care, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to an interpretation that a private company could have religious beliefs that LGBT people are not equal or somehow go against their beliefs and therefore fire them. We disagree with that trend. The implications of Hobby Lobby are becoming clear.""We do not take this move lightly," she added. "We've been pushing for this bill for 20 years."Separately, a coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights said in a joint statement that they also would be withdrawing support. The bill’s religious exemptions clause is written so broadly that “ENDA’s discriminatory provision, unprecedented in federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, could provide religiously affiliated organizations – including hospitals, nursing homes and universities – a blank check to engage in workplace discrimination against LGBT people,” the group said, adding later that if ENDA were to pass Congress, “the most important federal law for the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community in American history would leave too many jobs, and too many LGBT workers, without protection.”
OK, ENDA WASN'T GOING TO BECOME LAW ANYWAYThe House Republican majority of predators and mental and moral defectives has seen to that. Why, the very idea of the federal government protecting lesbians, gays, transgenders, and bisexuals from employment discrimination, that's just disgusting! As if they were, you know, normal people! Shocking!At the same time, in fairness to Justice Sammy and his transparent tissue of lies, he was writing, or rather obfuscating, for the longer term, when there might not be a house of Congress controlled by people who should be either in institutions or in cages. So no, I don't think he gets a free pass on this count.Just to be clear, for all the progress that has been made on the marriage-equality front, an awful lot of LGBT folks have believed strongly, all through that fight, that it was of less practical importance to many LGBT people, especially those outside the more liberal and urbane urban centers, than some kind of enforceable legal protection against anti-LGBT discrimination in employment and housing. I still don't think most Americans understand that in an awful lot of the country people can be denied jobs and/or housing because they're L, G, B, or T. Republican sociopaths, and not a few Democratic ones too, believe that the right to discriminate against LGBT people is sacred, and will give no ground on it till they're forced.There are, in other words, a lot of Americans who won't hear the pain when NGLTF's Rea Carey says of her group's decision to withdraw support for ENDA: "We do not take this move lightly. We've been pushing for this bill for 20 years."But then, we wouldn't want the Supreme Court to be complicit in the restriction of korporate krazy kultists' right to inflict their korporate kultist kraziness on non-kultists. After all, corporate religious convictions are corporate religious convictions. Why do we have Supreme Court if not to, by God, protect them?#