mysteries

[calimac]

1. Where the ice pooling up in the bottom of our freezer is coming from.

2. Why Sam Alito believes that business executives are reduced to second-class citizens if they aren't allowed to impose their religious views on their employees' health care.

3. Why I keep forgetting to take my "must take with food" pills at lunch, and have to have a second small lunch just for them.

4. Why all of a sudden Marion Zimmer Bradley is now a villain when her second husband's unfortunate sexual proclivities, and her willingness to live with that, has been public knowledge for fifty years.

5. How our drive to San Diego is going to go.  (It will go well, I hope.)

6. What makes Americans suddenly so interested in soccer, after decades of neglect.  (My theory is that this has been in the works ever since Brandi Chastain removed her shirt.)

7. Why all the Gilbert and Sullivan societies are now so interested in staging The Grand Duke.

8. How long it's going to take me to clean up all the errors and omissions in the draft version of the latest annual Tolkien bibliography.  (Back to the sweatbox.)

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read that part. It's a classic case of "which of these things is not like the others?" A strange redefinition seems to be going on of religious liberty as meaning "the right to dictate your religious policy to other people." This is also what's behind all the "War on Marriage" and "War on Christmas" nonsense, all of which is merely a denial of the right of conservative Christians to continue dictating religious policy to everybody else.

The claim that this is "the liberty to tell women that if they want contraception they have to pay for it out of pocket" is both disingenuous and obnoxious to the American political system. (It may not be objectionable to your view, but pure libertarianism is not the political system we're operating under.) It's disingenuous first, because the whole point of health care insurance is to avoid the undue burden of paying out of pocket. If that weren't an undue burden, there would be no point in requiring insurance. It's disingenuous, second, because "out of pocket" is a false distinction from "employee compensation." The health care package is part of the employee's compensation; it's taken out of your pocket pay in two senses, first, that many health care packages now are built on co-payments and deductibles, and second, in that the actual in-pocket pay is much lower than it would be without the health care package. The employer shouldn't get to pick and choose what parts of the health care package the employee is allowed to use any more than the employer should have the right to dictate what the employee buys with her in-pocket money.

If that sounds like a strained parallel, it's much less so than the parallel Alito tries to draw in the quote. The claim that these contraceptive techniques equal abortion is untrue - Hobby Lobby is entitled to its own moral opinions, but not to its own scientific facts - and, knowing this, many of its defenders are revealingly framing their arguments as shock that employees are claiming the right to have their health care plans include the right to have paid the equipment for consequent-free sex. That objection is policing of morals with a vengeance - nanny-state (or nanny-company) government at its worst. And funny, too, because nobody's objecting to health care plans paying for Viagra.

It's obnoxious to the American political system because, despite the decision's desperate claim that it applies only to this particular case - which, if true, would allow objection to abortion, or contraceptives at all, to trump all other political considerations - this decision "open[s] the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind." That's a quote from the decision which the law now being interpreted by Alito was intended to overturn. So the warning was right; the judge who penned it was Justice Scalia. Scalia was also right the time he warned that the Lawrence decision would open the gates to gay marriage, the only difference being that, that time, the prospect was an appealing one.