SCOTUS vs Women of the USA

SCOTUS 2, Women 0.

I know I haven’t written about it yet, and obviously these news stories from last week went right to the heart of one of my pet issues: reproductive rights.

One reason I haven’t commented yet is because as I stated in my “Malaise Post,” I don’t really have anything new to say about politics.  It’s just the same shit over and over.  If you’ve read me before, you know where I stand here. 

Another reason I’ve been quiet is that my friend the Red Pen Mama covered both the Buffer Zone ruling, and the Hobby Lobby/birth control case, better than anything I could have done, and she does it with the standing of being one of the people affected, either past or present.  She is the married, Catholic, mother of three, and she has skin in the game.

I wrote about the Buffer Zone case back in January, when it was being presented to the court.  My main point was that it seemed the Justices had mistaken impression that the protesters were interested in engaging in civilized confrontation.  I said all they should have done was run some film of a typical Planned Parenthood entryway gauntlet, to see how much civility there really was.  The clinics don’t use volunteer escorts because the women are afraid of a polite conversation. 

Instead, the court ruled that the protester’s right to free expression trumped women’s rights not to be yelled at, jostled, harassed, shamed and intimidated for daring to walk into a clinic to get birth control, a pap smear, or an abortion.

The Hobby Lobby case is also disturbing because it we essentially had five , male Catholics, predominantly white, deciding a case where women’s health care choices were at stake, with the Catholic faith in the middle.  No kidding that they found for Hobby Lobby’s right to have a few individuals make thousands of employees dance to the dictates of someone else’s religion.

And this isn’t some “religious institution” or Little Sisters of the Poor situation… it’s just another company selling cheaply made shit from China.  As I commented on RPM's blog post, "I wish I shopped at Hobby Lobby, just so I could stop."

I guaran-damn-tee you that if this was a case with a Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or any other religion besides Christian owner refusing to provide insurance for a service 98% of the country has used, this case falls the other way.

Just wait until the ripples of this case shake some more cases from the tree, and we see who else doesn’t want to pay for some other health care option.

Of course Congress can always pass a law to mediate the situation, but I’m not holding my breath.  I think both sides are too interested on campaigning on the issue to do any real damage control.

In the meantime, chalk up two more times the Roberts Court finds in favor of the powerful at the expense of those in need.