PSA: Hobby Lobby is awesome!

2JEL

I don't actually spend much time on the bump and definitely don't want the majority of the time I do spend on the bump to be arguing re: law and policy, so I mostly circled back here because I didn't want to be the person who throws out a bunch of (potentially) inflammatory/unpopular opinions and then runs.

Given the above, I really want to not further revive this thread, but couldn't get to it before personal trainer and lunch date and feel that I do owe the above posters the courtesy of a response, which I'm intentionally curbing to just respond to questions and not argue (re-argue) the same positions.

While I don't think corporations should have religious rights, I think that the individuals who are entitled to free exercise of religion should be able to run small, medium and even large companies that they hold closely in accordance with their values, even when they are unpopular.  This is a legal question that has fairly strong support on both sides in philosophical theory and somewhat limited analysis in law.  It sounds like we agree that people should be able to make decisions in (a) businesses where they are the only employee or (b) businesses categorized as non-profits according to their beliefs.  I think for now we will have to agree to disagree that employing any additional individuals prohibits you from making business decisions in accordance with your conscience. 

Re: Equal Protection of religions, there is a long constitutional history of treating religions differently based on factors that reflect on their legitimacy (age, history, establishment; i.e. Judaism and Islam will both get a lot more deference than Cult of People Who Hate Healthcare/Taxes/Public Education) and I think that's appropriate.  As a member of one faith, I would prefer to see more religions (not cults, which I acknowledge, for those of you who haven't taken sociology/anthropology, the line between the former and latter is thin) receive more deference and think the Court was/is wrong if it in fact does not extend the same conscientious objector protections to Muslims, Jews, Mormons and even Christian Scientists.  Again, this is a philosophical divide on liberty of employers to create a business that doesn't violate their beliefs v. government granted rights of employees to work for whomever they want and receive from those employers whatever the government decides they are entitled.

I'm not going to defend HL's hypocrisy or lack of hypocrisy beyond my earlier comments pointing out that they do in fact sacrifice large amounts of money (relative to any purported savings on certain subsets of birth control) to try to follow their religious beliefs-- my new point is that as an evangelical and also an avid student of neurophysiology and pop psychology we are all hypocrites in some areas/behaviors/blind spots, it's part of human nature/biology.  We all make compromises knowingly and unknowingly when faced with imperfect options (for those looking for entertaining, easy reading on this topic, I highly recommend "You are Not So Smart" written by David McRaney https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-So-Smart/dp/1592407366, who I would assume is a liberal scholar)-- and I think as a society we should not jump to assume that anytime someone does something that is hypocritical towards their stated beliefs it means their beliefs are insincere.  Going back way earlier in the thread, many of us who believe in human rights and living wages own (several) Apple devices (or products from Walmart or shoes they purchased for less than $200, etc.) and I'm sure that Apple/Walmart/Nike management would say they have those beliefs as well, but due to a number of self-serving mental/logistical/philosophical gymnastics, we've mostly decided we must have the trappings of the lifestyles we're accustomed to instead of refusing to buy items we know were made in conformity with our values.

To summarize, we're all human and I think humanity would benefit from respecting individual differences and giving other people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming everybody who disagrees with them is nefarious or dishonest.  Coming from the bowels of elite legal practice where everybody is out to destroy each other, I'm extremely impressed that the people on this board (or at least this thread, not sure about the BF threads ) seem to act with courtesy and respect.

soulcupcake

@2JEL - I understand your position, and I agree in part with the following:

"I think as a society we should not jump to assume that anytime someone does something that is hypocritical towards their stated beliefs it means their beliefs are insincere."

While it may be ill-advised for one to make outright assumptions, critically and objectively weighing information, and observing behaviors and attitudes, is, well, paramount. Proper discernment is a good thing. I also don't automatically assume one's beliefs are disingenuous or insincere if hypocrisy is suspected. An individual can believe X, and still commit or do Y, even if Y is ethically or morally questionable. It doesn't mean the basis of their faith, the core, is insincere. However, it points to a lack of consistency in how one is supposed to act or behave, and I see no reason to avoid taking notice to such behaviors. Some even struggle with conflicting ideas within their own ideology. Cognitive dissonance is very real, and faced by many people who have, what they believe, are sincere beliefs. But it doesn't mean their actions aren't inconsistent. No one is above reproach, and true, we all have our own cognitive biases and attitudes, based largely on the presuppositions we hold due to our own ideological background/exposure. No doubt that's true. This, also, is true:

"but due to a number of self-serving mental/logistical/philosophical gymnastics, we've mostly decided we must have the trappings of the lifestyles we're accustomed to instead of refusing to buy items we know were made in conformity with our values."

But it's nothing new. It's in man's nature to rationalize his biases and perceptions, and in the process commit a host of logical fallacies, unfortunately. In many ways, this is how we are able to continue making sense of things within our own perspective and worldview. In truth, we're emotional beings, governed not by objectivity and critical examination, naturally, but by emotion. And there's no difficulty in appealing to our emotions, and our thinking that is often guided by our emotions. Though we are often married to our own biases, there's no harm in attempting to be observant of our own shortcomings and perceptions. There's at least some intellectual honesty in admitting to whatever biases one may hold. Some go one step further by at least attempting to examine them as a third party, objectively, and hopefully critically.

P.S., nice mention of McRaney's book. I had a psychology professor recommend it. It's a fascinating field, the human mind, but I am still very much partial to comparative religion and philosophy (namely metaphysics, especially cosmology). But psychology is up at the top.

ColeyCannoli

2JEL said:

While I know many people on this board would likely favor firing women who won't perform abortions (or, as is now increasingly popular in leftist circles, attempting to require doctors to perform abortions before they can even get medical degrees...)

I'd like some proof of this if you have any. I hang out in some pretty leftists circles and a lot of medical ones and I have never heard of such a thing.

In fact, the only thing I've noticed is an increase in the harassment and hate for doctors who willingly chose to preform these procedures. There have been hundreds of new policies and restrictions lately that have caused many clinics to close altogether. Back where I used to live, there is now only one clinic still open for 100 miles either way. 

I won't debate pro-life vs. pro-choice at all on this forum, but I will point out that saying something like this that seems so based on "leftist" stereotyping really hurts your other points and paints a pretty clear picture of where you stood before the discussion even started.

ColeyCannoli

Okay, I have to put this here because I just found it today.

Satanist Temple Sites Hobby Lobby Ruling For Exemption From Abortion Laws

soulcupcake

ColeyCannoli said:

Okay, I have to put this here because I just found it today.

Satanist Temple Sites Hobby Lobby Ruling For Exemption From Abortion Laws

I came across this recently, and couldn't help but chuckle. I think it's awesome. Gotta appreciate their snark.

soulcupcake

ColeyCannoli said:

2JEL said:

While I know many people on this board would likely favor firing women who won't perform abortions (or, as is now increasingly popular in leftist circles, attempting to require doctors to perform abortions before they can even get medical degrees...)

I'd like some proof of this if you have any. I hang out in some pretty leftists circles and a lot of medical ones and I have never heard of such a thing.

In fact, the only thing I've noticed is an increase in the harassment and hate for doctors who willingly chose to preform these procedures. There have been hundreds of new policies and restrictions lately that have caused many clinics to close altogether. Back where I used to live, there is now only one clinic still open for 100 miles either way. 

I won't debate pro-life vs. pro-choice at all on this forum, but I will point out that saying something like this that seems so based on "leftist" stereotyping really hurts your other points and paints a pretty clear picture of where you stood before the discussion even started.

Precisely. Just this type of rhetoric alone tells readers where one's biases lie. And the above claim is rather meaningless without citing non-biased sources.

hzander2013

This was quite the thread.

caden1206

Is it me or am I the only one that is side-eyeing @2JEL‌ long winded speech up there? Other than a brief history lesson regarding the RFRA, I read a good amount of personal opinion and very little as it applies to the law. After reading her snarky introduction, I was hoping her "law degree and sophisticated understanding of Constitutional law" would help us further understand the ruling. Instead, most of my take home from her first post is that she disagrees with the ACA, thinks birth control prevents human life, and wanted to go cuddle with her DH. Statements like the one below are just plain false and I hope anyone reading her response takes everything she said with a grain of salt.

"The ACA was intended as a direct attack on the rights and conscience of conservative (mostly evangelical but evidently also Catholic) individuals and employers and many people in Congress objected to it because of this at the time."

2JEL

Looks like I congratulated the tread a bit pre-maturely.  

I feel like a few people are congratulating themselves for figuring out my (strong) pro-life bias, but I never intended to come across as anything other than pro-life and pro-religious liberty, I apologize to anyone who felt I was trying to sneak something past them.  As others have noted, we all come at this with one bias or another, some people call them value systems or world views, but nobody is entirely neutral.  I believe we do not know for certain the point at which a human life begins (though it is certainly by the time of heartbeat) and as such we should err on the side of caution in protecting all human life.

@Caden1206, I mentioned having an ivy league law degree (and weighed but ultimately decided against initially mentioning that I had the top grade in my con law class, also true, side-eye to your heart's content) primarily to explain why I felt it was necessary to participate in an already long thread and mostly to establish that there's not a solid legal basis for trashing the majority opinion, that many of the brighter minds in the legal field agree with the reasoning if they are not biased by their visceral reaction to the outcome.  You're welcome to your skepticism, I'm sorry you were unable to benefit from my effort to translate constitutional law history into moderately readable English.  I assure you that there was sufficient content to follow the reasoning of the majority decision if you were interested.

Since some of you were more interested in criticizing my statement that some leftists want to force doctors to perform abortions rather than doing the barest of google searches, I present:

(1) https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/10/1922/ -- citing Julian Savulescu of Oxford University, a neuroethecist who has advocated the position that doctors who do not want to perform abortions should not be doctors.

(2) https://blog.timesunion.com/mdtobe/should-med-students-be-required-to-watch-an-abortion/1352/ (and for those who prefer to attack than read, I understand that the author wants to force people to watch, not perform, but approximately 1/2 of the top ten comments insist that doctors should not be able to finish med school or become OBs w/o abortion training; 

(3) a bonus related article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics about how to make it much more difficult to opt out of performing abortions, such that doctors can only do it if they prove their religious beliefs, commitment to them, and that they would be subject to a great harm if they perform an abortion: https://jme.bmj.com/content/22/2/115.full.pdf).  

The most cursory attempts at research would have made this discussion unnecessary.  I also note that I did not say "all women who favor choice think doctors should have to perform abortions to graduate medical school" or "the majority of Democrats" or even "the majority of people on the left" -- so you're taking umbrage at a statement I didn't make and disputing a fact easily verified on the internet.   It is repulsive to many, but there are women (and men) out there who advocate extreme pro-abortion positions and saying things like "I've never heard a planned parenthood worker advocate a mother has the right to kill a baby after it survived a botched an abortion" doesn't mean that they have not said it or that it doesn't happen.  For those of you who have forgotten, we currently have a president in office who refused to support a bill that would provide medical care to breathing, crying infants that survived the mother and doctor's attempts to terminate it's life once it is outside the womb.  What is that I hear? Some of you don't believe that either? For you skeptics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-obama-vote-to-deny-rights-to-infant-abortion-survivors/2012/09/07/9852895a-f87d-11e1-8398-0327ab83ab91_blog.html (and for you especially lazy skeptics, scroll down to Born Alive Legislation, I'll save you paragraphs of WaPo trying to equivocate for him before they conclude 

"Illinois lawmakers voted down identical versions of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in 2001 and 2002 before a new iteration of the bill came before the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, headed by Obama. This new legislation removed the controversial line about recognizing live-born children as humans and giving them immediate protection under the law. It also addressed Obama’s concern about previable fetuses, adding a “neutrality clause” that said the measure would not affect the legal status of fetuses prior to delivery.

Nonetheless, Obama voted against the new bill, which happened to be an almost exact replica — almost to the word — of a federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that passed in 2002 without opposition in either politial party. (Updated: The vote in the House was by voice vote and the vote in the Senate was by unanimous consent.)

Obama swore during the 2008 election that he would have supported the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, prompting the National Right to Life Committee to issue a scathing white paper that pointed out how he had contradicted himself by voting against the Illinois measure while backing the older federal version in retrospect during his presidential campaign.

Obama denied any contradiction during an interview that year with the Christian Broadcasting Network, accusing the antiabortion committee of lying about the circumstances of his vote. Here’s what he said:

“I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported — which was to say — that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born — even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade.”

From what we can tell, Obama misrepresented the facts during this interview. The 2003 bill addressed his concerns about undermining Roe v. Wade, and it matched the federal legislation that he supported virtually word for word.

PolitiFact determined that the claim about a neutrality clause in the federal legislation was True.FactCheck.org said “Obama’s claim [about the committee lying] is wrong.”"

For what it's worth, I am happy to hear that many of you know of activists in the woman's repro rights who also respect doctor's rights of conscience.  If it turns out to be 99% of them and I've just seen especially dark corners of the twitterverse, so much the better!

To be clear, I am *NOT* suggesting that all people who believe in women's choice are evil or enjoy infanticide, but it is naive to think that some of the agenda is not being driven by extremists who believe everyone should share their views (it's part of why I support religious liberty opting-out). Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but they aren't entitled to ignorance of facts that make them uncomfortable.  Though I do not think it follows from any reasonable writing of my previous post, I do apologize to anyone who felt that I was trying to suggest all women's reproductive justice advocates believe abortion should be performed by conscientious objectors against their will.  I just wish people would investigate when they hear claims they don't like instead of setting up straw man arguments or rejecting them out of hand.

Husband just miraculously arrived home from work before 6pm, so I'm out for impromptu date night (and the rest the weekend), but wanted to include one last thought, I recently heard on a White Horse Inn podcast (this is a Lutheran service, not claiming it's objective but totally unrelated to abortion): "You don't earn the right to refute your opponents' position until you can articulate it in a way they would agree is a fair characterization of their argument."  I think in general internet message boards everywhere would be better off if we all followed this rule and hope that my explanation of RFRA and my explanation of the link between religious exercise and enterprise will help some people to find more common ground (or debunk the actual arguments of the right, if possible) as opposed to simply stating that Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court hate women's birth control.  In the long run, I think that understanding each other and finding the consensus is the only way to get back on track-- thanks again to everybody who read my post(s) with that intention and I hope everyone has a great weekend whatever their intentions may be.

aksue22

@2JEL‌ If Erwin Chemerinsky finds it disturbing, that says a LOT.

aksue22

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chemerinsky-hobby-lobby-supreme-court-20140701-story.html

soulcupcake

@2JEL - I'll try to come back to this later. Getting ready to watch a movie.

I do want to address the earlier part of your post. 

"Since some of you were more interested in criticizing my statement that some leftists want to force doctors to perform abortions rather than doing the barest of google searches, I present:"

That wasn't criticism. It was merely a statement claiming the onus is on you, the claimant, to provide credible sources. Since you're the one making them, after all.

Your first source is not objective in any sense of the word. The Witherspoon Institute is akin to a puffed up and more "sophisticated" version of Carm.org (an evangelical site with a Calvinist bent) or gotquestions.org. Witherspoon might consist of a more educated bunch, but their bias and agenda are really no different. Just packaged in seemingly fancy rhetoric, er, apologetics.

And your second "source," these are readers, not an organization, and people possess all sorts of beliefs and ideas, like bogus reparative therapy and believing sexual orientation is a "choice." In any case, I don't think it's inherently evil or awful that med students on an obstetrics rotation be trained in performing a D&C or D&E, which is performed far more often in situations involving incomplete miscarriages than voluntary termination of pregnancy.

I'm not sure why a resident would need to "watch" an actual termination as the procedure is the same regardless if it's a case of embryonic or fetal demise or termination of of a viable pregnancy.

And as for this part:

"For those of you who have forgotten, we currently have a president in office who refused to support a bill that would provide medical care to breathing, crying infants that survived the mother and doctor's attempts to terminate it's life once it is outside the womb.  What is that I hear? Some of you don't believe that either?"

See here and here. From 2012, in response to the article you shared.

soulcupcake

aksue22 said:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chemerinsky-hobby-lobby-supreme-court-20140701-story.html

Nice.