Religion or No Religion That is the Question

When truth cannot be told before the United States Supreme Court all is lost for justice and American jurisprudence.  The thesis propagated by the Religious Right that contraception is abortion is nonsense.  The IUD limits the motility of sperm.  Failing that, it inflames the uterine wall so that implantation isn’t possible. Hormonal birth control pills prevent ovulation, failing that they alter the composition of the uterine wall so that implantation isn’t possible.  The Plan B drugs, or morning after pills, prevent fertilization from occurring and are contraceptive not abortive.  RU486 is the abortion pill and works very differently than any of the above.  It is also not covered by the ACA (Affordable Care Act) and never was intended to be covered.   This is the science as near as I can ascertain it from The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.  I prefer to accept them as my authority rather than the Southern Baptist Church or a for profit organization that seems to me to want to undermine the ACA and promote insurance on the cheap.  That Donald B. Verrilli Jr., our Solicitor General, did not assert the science before the Supremes, but instead accepted on a good faith basis that Hobby Lobby truly believes that contraception is abortion is stunning.  We continue in this country to allow the knowledge and proven wisdom of the scientific community to be supplanted by the ideology and theology of the various politico-religious sects. 

Do I question the commitment of Hobby Lobby to their faith?  You’re damn right I do.  I reserve the right to question the faith of any organization that presumes to insinuate itself into the private lives of its female employees.  You had better be an impeccable Christian, living in the sure, certain and empirically provable knowledge of the rightness of your theology before you presume to worm your way into the legislative process in this country or set yourself up to judge and dispense a woman’s right to control her own reproductive functions on the basis of some bloody book of questionable historic merit and dubious authorship.   

It is a failing of the Democrats and this administration to be trapped in the political correctness that the Left accepted so long.  Thus, too few ever challenge these religious zealots on the application of their faith.  For instance, what do they plan to do about all the pregnant women who could possibly be in their employee, given that it is far more expensive to cover a pregnancy then it is to cover contraception?  Will Hobby Lobby pay their insurance, their maternity leave and keep their jobs open; or will this Christian corporation follow the lead of so many other corporations and discharge them, slithering out from under COBRA and leaving them with no income or insurance?  In other words, will Hobby Lobby follow the God of the Christians or the God of the Free Market when embryo comes to baby?

No one ever asks these questions, and no one ever will.  Certainly not on the Right leaning end of the Court ridden hard and put away wet by the likes of Chief Justice Roberts.  It will be interesting to see if Scalia that monstrous mountain of moralizing muck who once denied the Native American people the right to use peyote as an expression of religious freedom, extends to Hobby Lobby the right to sacrifice the reproductive rights of women in the name of theirs.  Finally, it will be doubly interesting to see if the United States Supreme Court confirms its utter uselessness, even dangerousness, to the American people and our Republic that it so unabashedly displayed in Citizens United.