{"id":77722,"date":"2014-07-01T18:42:06","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T22:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=77722"},"modified":"2014-07-01T21:24:09","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T01:24:09","slug":"mercury-direct-the-hobby-lobby-decision-and-the-usa-chart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/planet-waves-fm\/mercury-direct-the-hobby-lobby-decision-and-the-usa-chart\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercury Direct, the Hobby Lobby Decision and the USA Chart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"640+web-planetwavesfm\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Listen to program<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Monday, the Supreme Court by a 5 to 4 vote determined that the Hobby Lobby, Inc. chain of stores has the right to ignore a federal mandate under the Affordable Care Act to provide birth control coverage to women. The owners of the company believe, falsely, that certain kinds of female contraception are the equivalent of abortion, and since “life begins at conception,” that this is a sin. In other words, a corporation has sued and won the right to have a religious conscience, based on junk science.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Protest<\/a>
Protest outside Hobby Lobby in Denver.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

True to a corporation, which is an entity with no possibility of having a conscience, the company also has $75 million of its pension funds invested in larger funds that hold stock for the companies that manufacture various contraceptive drugs and devices to which it supposedly objects.<\/p>\n

I had a lot to cover in this discussion, and somehow skipped reading the chart. It’s obvious that the decision came out immediately before Mercury stationing direct — about 23 hours before. This suggests that there is, at least, going to be an unexpected backlash, and that the decision might be reversed. This will certainly be an issue used to galvanize women in the coming two federal elections. I would however caution that Roe v. Wade<\/a>, the ruling that guarantees abortion rights and prevents a miscarriage from being deemed a murder scene, is on extremely thin ice right now, and I don’t think that the conservatives on the court would hesitate to reverse it, if they had the right case.<\/p>\n

I will probably discuss this more next week, though we’ve been down a similar road before. In 1986, the court ruled on a case called Bowers v. Hardwick<\/a>, in a decision that held that there is no right to anal or oral sex. Yes. Then Associated Justice William Rhenquist cited Judeo-Christian tradition in his ruling, which was one of the most criticized (harshly, by the left and the right) decisions in Supreme Court history.<\/p>\n

Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote a short concurring opinion and said, “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”<\/p>\n

There was such an onslaught of opposition that the court did something rare and reversed itself in a 2003 decision called Lawrence v. Texas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In this edition, I also cover the USA Sibly Chart. Here is a link to an article on that chart<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen to program. Monday, the Supreme Court by a 5 to 4 vote determined that the Hobby Lobby, Inc. chain of stores has the right to ignore a federal mandate under the Affordable Care Act to provide birth control coverage to women. The owners of the company believe, falsely, that certain kinds of female contraception … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1735],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77722"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}