Hobby Lobby may be just the beginning of an attack on all contraceptive rights and on Griswold
the case decided by a previous Supreme Court granting us the right to use contraception.
This is a grave threat to the autonomy and freedom of the American people.
Here is information about Griswold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut
First, Jeffrey Toobin's take:
The Supreme Court concluded its term today with a pair of decisions widely described as “narrow”—that is, of limited application except to the parties in the lawsuits. Don’t believe it.
In fact, the Court’s decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn conform to an established pattern for the Roberts Court. It’s generally a two-step process: in confronting a politically charged issue, the court first decides a case in a “narrow” way, but then uses that decision as a precedent to move in a more dramatic, conservative direction in a subsequent case.
. . . .
The Hobby Lobby decision follows the same pattern. Again, Justice Alito’s opinion (for the same five-to-four majority) expressed its ruling in narrow terms. Alito asserted that the case concerned only a single “closely held” private company whose owners had religious objections to providing certain forms of birth control. According to the court, federal law required that those wishes be honored.
But, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, there is almost no limitation on the logic of the majority’s view. Almost any closely held companies—which make up a substantial chunk of the American economy—can now claim a religious orientation, and they can now seek to excuse themselves from all sorts of obligations, including honoring certain anti-discrimination laws. And after today’s “narrow” rulings, those cases will come.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/hobby-lobby-the-supreme-courts-narrow-decisions.html
Jeffrey Toobin is reported to be a long-time friend of Elena Kagan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Toobin
And concurring on the idea that this decision presages an attack on Griswold:
Yesterday Supreme Court Decision, BURWELL, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL. v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC., was on first read fairly narrow. It seemed to be just about four methods of birth control, which Justice Sam Alito wrote for the the majority that:
If the Government substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion, under the Act (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, RFRA) that person is entitled to an exemption from the rule unless the Government “demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.*
It sounds like a very narrow and reasonable stand. We will not burden you more than we need to, and we believe that this is your right, since the Government has a way to deal with this. The Insurance Companies can also eat the cost and be done with it. It is cheaper than paying for pregnancy.
The decision also sounds like it is just about the four methods at play. Two pills and to intra uterine devices. None of them cause an abortion in the scientific sense of the word, but that argument was not attractive to the majority. Never mind that it science.
We now know that this is now extending to all twenty methods and the twenty methods of contraception. Lower courts are also starting to use this new decision as precedent. For example, an Alabama Broadcaster had the mandate halted and the lower Court used this decision as the basis for it.
http://nadinabbottblog.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/hobby-lobby-decision-is-quite-broad/
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