Month: July 2014

Why Am I Not So Alarmed By Hobby Lobby? Ctd

Iud

Some second day thoughts. (You can read a variety of new overnight bloggy reactions to the case here.)

First off, it still seems to me that the fury over banned contraception is de trop. Of the twenty forms of contraception mandated as covered in the ACA, Hobby Lobby agreed to fund all but four of them, the ones that could, in their view, be seen as abortifacients. I think they’re pretty obviously wrong about that as a scientific matter. In which case, the best counter-argument is to make is exactly that: their religious consciences are simply empirically misinformed. But that is not the argument being proffered.

Secondly, this case is effectively an affirmation of our new, libertarian order. Ross has a great blog post on this today. For the first time, evangelical Christians are pretty much a minority on a major social question (a few forms of contraception), and they are therefore, like many minorities before them, looking to the Court to protect them. Money quote from Ross:

On other culture-war fronts — same-sex marriage, most notably — the old dynamic still sort of shows up, with judges repeatedly overturning democratically-enacted (though, in many cases, no longer majority-supported) laws that religious conservatives tended to support. But on religious liberty, the old order is increasingly reversed, with conservative believers looking to the courts rather than the vox populi for protection against moves made by the elected branches, and especially the current national executive.

Why is this not overall a good development? I remain of the view that if this precedent leads to discrimination in employment against purported sinners, then it will be a death-knell for Christianity in America. If Christianity becomes about marginalizing groups of people, it will be a betrayal of the Gospels and a sure-fire path to extinction. And the Christianists will not win with that argument, as the marriage equality experience demonstrates. But if evangelical or orthodox Catholic Christians seek merely to protect themselves from being coerced by government in overly aggressive fashion – remember that the Obama administration lost this fight because they chose the maximalist position with respect to employer-provided health insurance and did not choose another, less invasive path of providing contraception – then I think that’s a paradigm worth encouraging.

Religion is best when it does not seek to impose itself on other people.

This, indeed, is the core heresy of Christianism – a desire to impose religious rules on others who do not share the faith. But when it seeks merely to carve out a space in a secular culture where it can operate as autonomously as possible, it is imposing nothing on anyone. It is merely seeking an exemption for itself. Yes, Hobby Lobby prevents its own employees, who may not be evangelical Christians, from getting four types of contraception. But nothing in the ruling prevents other ways of providing those options that do not violate anyone’s consciences. A single-payer provision, for example, would not incur any religious freedom issues. Which means that this decision is, in essence, a libertarian one. And the more the evangelical right seeks merely to protect its own rights, rather than imposing on anyone else’s, the better.

There is, in other words, a kernel here that could unwind Christianism as a domineering force in our multi-faith and multi-cultural polity. Perhaps liberals and old-school conservatives should cheer that, instead of hyperventilating quite as much as they did yesterday.

(Photo: An Iud by BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

“The New Abstinence”

That’s how Maureen O’Connor describes not Googling your date:

After years of negotiating the onslaught of personal information available online, most had concluded that stalking dates online was a fool’s errand. Not everyone had Naomi’s self-control, but, like her, many defaulted to the language of chastity when discussing online date research. Googling may be “tempting,” but “resisting” is important until you are “ready.” When The Guardianasked readers whether “stalking a crush online” was a digital sin, 24 percent voted to “condemn.” In fact, amid a backlash against the personal information free-for-all, a new generation of dating start-ups has taken a minimalist approach: Tinder and Hinge have ditched the traditional profile; Twine limits access to pictures.

A Vehicle Of Freedom

Adrienne LaFrance praises the bicycle for its contribution to women’s rights:

The [1890s bicycle] craze was meaningful, especially, for women. Both Susan B. Anthony Screen Shot 2014-06-27 at 2.02.15 PMand Elizabeth Cady Stanton are credited with declaring that “woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle,” a line that was printed and reprinted in newspapers at the turn of the century. The bicycle took “old-fashioned, slow-going notions of the gentler sex,” as The Courier (Nebraska) reported in 1895, and replaced them with “some new woman, mounted on her steed of steel.” And it gave women a new level of transportation independence that perplexed newspaper columnists across the country. …

“The woman on the wheel is altogether a novelty, and is essentially a product of the last decade of the century,” wrote The Columbian (Pennsylvania) newspaper in 1895, “she is riding to greater freedom, to a nearer equality with man, to the habit of taking care of herself, and to new views on the subject of clothes philosophy.” Yes, bicycle-riding required a shift away from the restrictive, modest fashion of the Victorian age, and ushered in a new era of exposed ankles – or at least visible bloomers – that represented such a departure from the laced up, ruffled down fashion that preceded it that bicycling women became a fascination to the (mostly male) newspaper reporters of the time.

The bicycle still serves as an inspiring symbol for female liberation; see our coverage of the 2013 Saudi film Wadjda.

(Cartoon from the June 23, 1895 issue of The [L.A.] Herald, via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers)

Laying Down Landmines

The US announced on Friday that it would stop producing anti-personnel mines, in a possible move toward finally joining the 15-year-old Ottawa ban treaty:

This new announcement builds on previous commitments, the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the announcement, “to end the use of all non-detectable mines and all persistent mines, which can remain active for years after the end of a conflict.” In layman’s terms, in the past administrations have chosen to draw the line between so-called “dumb mines,” which last indefinitely, and “smart mines” that deactivate on their own. While the Clinton administration refused to sign onto the Ottawa Convention, it did decide to ban its use of “dumb mines” everywhere but on the border between North and South Korea, already destroying 3.3 million AP mines back in 1999. At present, the U.S. is estimated to have approximately 9 million self-destructing anti-personnel mines in its stockpile.

Beauchamp looks back at how our military commitment in Korea has kept us from signing the treaty thus far:

Why is Korea such a big sticking point for the US?

In very simple terms, North Korea vastly outnumbers its southern neighbor in troops. The North Korean military is almost double the size of its South Korean counterpart (roughly 1.2 million to 700,000). The massive quantity of landmines planted in the DMZ, in the US’s view, would considerably slow down any attempt by the North Korean military to rapidly overwhelm the South by dint of sheer numbers.

In the 1990s, many of those landmines were American-owned mines, not Korean. So if the US had accepted a treaty commitment to dismantle its mine stock, it would have had to dismantle weapons it believed were deterring a North Korean invasion. Today, though, South Korea technically controls all of the mines — not the US. However, joining the Ottawa Convention would prohibit any US-led forces from military cooperation with nations that use landmines during wartime. Considering that there are 30,000 US troops in South Korea, signing the treaty would severely constrain the US’s ability to work with South Korea.

The political point-scoring has, of course, already begun:

On Friday, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a statement calling the effort to replace landmines with new technology “an expensive solution in search of a nonexistent problem.”

“Once again, the President makes an end-run around Congress and demonstrates his willingness to place politics above the advice of our military leaders,” McKeon said. “His announcement today is perfect for a feel-good press release but bad for the security of our men and women in uniform. … McKeon said President Obama “owes our military an explanation for ignoring their advice and putting them at risk — all for a Friday morning press release.”

To Be A Christian In The “Islamic State”

Well, you may be able to imagine. Andrew Doran and Drew Bowling report on the plight of Mosul’s terrified Christians:

On June 23, the Assyrian International News Agency reported that ISIS terrorists entered the Iraqi Refugees in Erbilhome of a Christian family in Mosul and demanded that they pay the jizya (a tax on non-Muslims). According to AINA, “When the Assyrian family said they did not have the money, three ISIS members raped the mother and daughter in front of the husband and father. The husband and father was so traumatized that he committed suicide.”

Although few reports from ISIS-occupied Iraq can be corroborated, the group’s record of torture chambers, public executions, and crucifixions lends credibility to nightmarish accounts from the ground. Since the fall of Mosul, a litany of evils has replaced the liturgies of the Christians there: a young boy ripped from the arms of his parents as they ran from the ISIS advance and shot before their eyes, girls killed for not wearing the hijab.

Small wonder that since the fall of Mosul, tens of thousands of defenseless civilians have fled the ISIS onslaught, including the region’s Christians, whose presence on the Nineveh plains dates back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. Most have left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Meanwhile, some Iraqi Christians are turning to Putin as a possible savior:

“Russia proved through history that it’s the only defender of Christians,” said Ashur Giwargis, who heads the Assyrian Patriotic Movement (APM), which for two years has energetically lobbied the Kremlin to support an independent Assyrian Christian state in northern Iraq. Until recently, the Beirut-based exile and his colleagues, who are scattered among the global Iraqi diaspora, had little to show for their efforts, but in January, as Western-Russian tensions escalated over Ukraine, Giwargis was summoned to Moscow to meet government officials. …

There are few assurances that Russia—which is already held in low regard by much of the Arab World for its stance on Syria—will further jeopardize its relations across the region by throwing its weight behind Iraq’s Christians. Nor, for that matter, does APM’s courting of Putin necessarily command serious support among many Iraqi Christians, of whom only 10-15 percent favor its pro-active approach, according to several church officials.

But the APM’s fishing for alternative patrons is illustrative of the tremendous anger many Eastern Christians feel towards the West for its perceived indifference to their plight.

(Photo: A Iraqi girl fleeing from the city of Mosul arrives at a Kuridish checkpoint. ISIS has captured major roads and town in central Iraq. June 12, 2014. By Sebastiano Tomada/Getty Images.)

Hobby Lobby Wins: Reax II

Our early roundup of blog commentary is here. My initial take on the ruling is here. Your thoughts are here and here – and we’re compiling many more. From the next wave of blog commentary, Amy Davidson seizes on several quotes from Ginsburg’s dissent and anguishes over the majority decision:

Alito sees all the substance in how put-upon the owners of corporations feel. In oral arguments, Kennedy openly worried that companies would somehow be mixed up with abortion, and one suspects that his sense that abortion is a distinctly volatile, morally charged subject was part of why he acquiesced here, and why seems to believe, against all reason, that this decision is narrow. Women’s health is treated as something troublesome—less like other kinds of health care, which a company should be asked to pay for, than as a burden for those who have to contemplate it.

Soraya Chemaly is on the same page:

Ninety-nine percent of sexually active women will use birth control at some point in their lives. The Court’s decision displays the profound depth of patriarchal norms that deny women autonomy and the right to control our own reproduction—norms that privilege people’s “religious consciences” over women’s choices about our own bodies, the welfare of our families, our financial security and our equal right to freedom from the imposition of our employers’ religious beliefs. … This religious qualifier was narrowly construed to address just this belief and not others, such as prohibitions on vaccines or transfusions. It is not a coincidence that all three female members of the Court and only one man of six dissented from this opinion.

Drum is also bummed:

This is not a ruling that upholds religious liberty. It is a ruling that specifically enshrines opposition to abortion as the most important religious liberty in America.

But McArdle doesn’t buy such sweeping statements:

Here’s a representative tweet from my feed this morning: “So let’s all deny women birth control & get closer to harass them when they’re going in for repro health services. BECAUSE FREEDOM.” Logically, this is incoherent, unless you actually believe that it is impossible to buy birth control without a side payment from your employer. (If you are under this tragic misimpression, then be of good cheer! Generic birth control pills are available from the drugstore for about $25 a month.) Otherwise, according to the reasoning of that tweet, I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines. …

Now, there are women out there for whom a few dollars a month is a crippling expense, but I venture to say that few of them are salaried workers getting health insurance from closely held corporations with deeply religious owners; most of them will be hourly workers on Medicaid.

Suderman counters critics of the court’s view that “corporations are people”:

The key to Alito’s ruling arguably comes down to just two words: “a person’s.” The big question isn’t whether the contraception mandate violates the religious freedoms of some faceless corporate entity entirely separate from the individuals who own that company—it’s whether the requirement would violate the free exercise of religious for the particular people who founded and now run the company. As Alito writes in his opinion, “A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends….When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people.”

Ilya Somin adds on that score:

Even the dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg partially recognizes this, since she accepts that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does apply to nonprofit religious corporations, such as those established by churches. The latter, of course, are no more natural “persons” than for-profit corporations are. In modern society, people routinely use corporations for a wide range of activities. Numerous employers, churches, schools, newspapers, charities, and other organizations use the corporate form. When they do so, their owners and employees should not have to automatically check their constitutional and statutory rights at the door.

Meanwhile, Aaron Blake notes something I mentioned last night: the court’s metric of “closely held” – defined by the IRS as companies in which five or fewer individuals own more than half the stock – affects about 90 percent of all businesses and about 50 percent of all employees. Blake then asks:

But does that mean the employers of half of all Americans will suddenly nix contraception coverage?

Of course not. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 85 percent of large employers had already offered contraception coverage before Obamacare mandated it. And while Hobby Lobby fought that mandate, so far few other large companies have joined them. … [T]here is little reason to believe that tens of millions of American women will suddenly see their contraception coverage come to an end.

And for those who do lose their coverage, Danny Vinik reminds us that “employees of closely held corporations may receive contraceptive coverage anyway”:

That coverage would likely mimic the workaround developed in 2012 by the Department of Health and Humans Services. That regulation exempted nonprofit religious institutions like hospitals and charities (churches were already exempt) from adhering to the contraceptive mandate. However, it required insurance companies to offer contraceptive coverage free of charge to those employees. This workaround, the Obama administration argued, ensured that religious institutions were not directly participating in offering contraception to their employees.

In fact, Alito essentially recommends that workaround in his ruling. Cohn takes that one step further to argue that “the obvious solution to this dilemma is to take health insurance away from employers altogether” and give it to “the government or tightly regulated insurers”:

But the people and groups who oppose government’s providing insurance directly tend to be the same people who object to the contraception mandate. That’s not a coincidence. While I don’t doubt the religious objections to birth control are sincere, I do think they are masking another belief conservatives bring to this debate: As a general rule, conservatives don’t think government should be compelling them to pay for other people’s medical expenses.

As Beutler puts it, “Ironically, and appropriately, the ruling probably prefigures a call for a greater, not smaller, government role in the health care system.” Still, any such workarounds probably won’t satisfy companies like Hobby Lobby:

To take advantage of the exemption, a closely held company owned by religiously devout individuals must file a form, specified by the government, in order to trigger the legal duty of the “middle man” to provide the coverage as a stand-in for the company or its owners. Federal government lawyers have made it clear in court, over and over again, that the “middle man” will not have any authority to step in unless the company or its owners file that government form claiming an exemption for the mandate. Some whose religions tell them to have nothing to do with some forms of birth control (often on the premise that they amount to a form of abortion) believe that even the filing of that formal declaration is itself an act of participation in the provision of those very services for people on their payroll.

And that argument is winding its way through the courts:

At least 51 nonprofit lawsuits have been filed against the administration’s policy by groups that say the accommodation still forces them to violate their religious beliefs since they have to arrange for the contraception coverage. Some of those challenges have reached the appellate court level, and just this past New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the requirement against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Colorado nuns.

As SCOTUSblog pointed out over the weekend, two more religious-affiliated groups on Friday asked for a similar protection from the contraception rule. “It is now nearly a certainty” that the Supreme Court will take up the nonprofit challenges to the contraception requirement next term, according to SCOTUSblog.