Supremes vote for religious bigotry

[whell]

Originally Posted by finnbow

In an interesting twist (in my mind, anyway), the SCOTUS earlier found that the mandate under Obamacare was a tax. Now, they've as much as said you can pick which items of this tax you choose not to pay for.

That's convoluted. Roberts said that the government could impose a "tax" for an individuals failure to purchase coverage. The HHS's regulations on which contraception methods were covered under the elements of essential coverage came later, and were not in the original text of the law but part of regulations promulgated by HHS.

And, once again, the SCOTUS decision applies only to closely held organizations with a self funded plans and clearly articulated religious convictions. That's about as narrow as you can get.

How Christian is Hobby Lobby? Its Muzak is spiced with hymns. Some of its corporate meetings begin with prayer. It employs chaplains who evangelize not only to nominal Christians, but also to non-believing workers. More substantively, it gives employees Sundays off as church-and-family days, and pays more than twice the Oklahoma minimum wage to entry-level workers on Christian grounds. According to David Green, Hobby Lobby’s founder, and his son Steve, its President, the company also gives away roughly half its earnings, which would come to over $50 million a year– and make it something close to a steroidal Christian charity.

In other words, the company is about as Christian as it is possible for a corporation to get, which was essential in convincing the courts that some corporations could be considered “persons” protected by the 1993 law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

http://time.com/2941342/supreme-cour...care-liberals/

What's up with the left's political agenda about making more out this ruling than it really is? From the same article:

But it (the SCOTUS decision) also enabled—indeed, invited—the Supreme Court to avoid ruling that non closely-held corporations, which is to say most of them, have any religious rights, and to rule out some of the more controversial claims even by closely-held businesses. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, “the idea that unrelated shareholders—including institutional investors with their own set of stakeholders—would agree to run a corporation under the same religious beliefs seems improbable. In any event, we have no occasion in these cases to consider RFRA’s applicability to such companies.