Sandra Fluke: Supreme court may open a Pandora's Box of discrimination masked as "freedom"

[Triana]

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Those of us who care about women’s equality, workers’ rights and legal protections for minority groups – there are a lot of us – are nervous. So I called up Sandra Fluke, the reproductive justice activist who is now running for state legislature in California, for a preview.

“Not only does this case potentially undermine the protections for affordable insurance coverage for contraception, but it could undermine a whole host of protections against discrimination – race, sexual orientation, gender,” Fluke told me late last week. “We’ve seen people step forward and say it: ‘I shouldn’t have to pay men and women equal wages because of my religion. I shouldn’t have to serve LGBT folks.’”

This week’s cases are about contraception. But as Fluke points out, the issues will go far beyond corporate personhood, insurance requirements and the healthcare law – no small topics of debate themselves. The justices are now prepared to set in stone the it’s-my-religion defense of wholesale discrimination, the groundwork for which has been set across the conservative spectrum for years.

“Right-wing groups pushing religious liberty at the expense of women’s health,” Fluke says, “use what should be a shield for one person’s individual personal beliefs – and a legal protection of those beliefs – to try to turn that into a sword to impose those values more broadly and undermine other peoples’ ability to make their own medical choices.”

Freedom of religion is carved into the Constitution, and the Affordable Care Act allows churches and other houses of worship a kind of out from the contraception mandate. What happens if that loophole gets undermined by for-profit companies? What happens if the supreme court opens up the law of the land to outright bigotry disguised as “freedom”?

THE REST:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/24/sandra-fluke-hobby-lobby-supreme-court-beyond-religious-libety

[Loudly]

1. The real potential for an adverse ruling in the Hobby Lobby case is just another reason

why Democratic candidates should be campaigning on Medicare for All this year.

It is the antidote for all things Teabagg in the area of health care for the middle class.