Scalia's major screw-up: How SCOTUS just gave liberals a huge gift (Click here to read more)
With an otherwise awful Hobby Lobby ruling, right-wing judges just said I don't have to pay for warfare! Here's why.
Sarah Ruden.
Before a recent visit by Justice Scalia to Wesleyan University, I (a lowly research fellow) gained an invitation to a banquet in his honor by employing a typical Quaker mix of idealism, stubbornness and low cunning. Once there, I thanked the eminent jurist for his liberal ruling in Crawford v. Washington, concerning the right to confront witnesses in criminal proceedings. This remark drew from him the quip that he ought to be a pinup in every public defender's office in the nation, because sometimes he was forced by clearly established constitutional principles to rule in favor of people he couldn't stand.
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With this in mind, I'm celebrating him for yet another socio-political gift to progressives and suggesting that he doesn't need to wear a thong - a modest bathing costume of 1910 vintage will do - in the poster religious pacifists like myself will want now that he and his brethren have ruled for Hobby Lobby et al., to the effect that private persons/corporations do not have to fund activities that violate their faith - such as the use of an IUD by an employee who may not even share that faith.
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The upshot of the ruling is that Hobby Lobby and other businesses with conservative religious owners do not need to pay for what the Affordable Care Act mandates as full coverage for family planning. The public interest in affordable and accessible healthcare is not compelling enough to override the private belief that contraceptive methods including (but apparently not limited to) the IUD and the morning-after pill are murder. Well, I'm a pacifist, and I say that warfare is murder, and I don't want to pay for it; and in recent decades the public interest in my paying for it hardly looks compelling.
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