Friday, July 11, 2014

There's some good advice

Federal Judge Blasts Hobby Lobby Decision: Supreme Court Should 'STFU' (Click here to read more)

By Ian Millhiser July 7, 2014 at 9:00 am Updated: July 7, 2014 at 10:01 am
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Judge Richard George Kopf, a George H.W. Bush appointee to the federal bench who maintains his own personal blog, has some harsh words for the Supreme Court in the wake of their birth control decision in the closely watched Hobby Lobby case: "the Court is now causing more harm (division) to our democracy than good by deciding hot button cases that the Court has the power to avoid. As the kids says, it is time for the Court to stfu."
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Just in case there is any ambiguity regarding what Judge Kopf means by "stfu," he links to an Urban Dictionary page which defines that grouping of letters as an "[a]cronym used for the phrase 'shut the fuck up' for efficiency reasons."
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Earlier in the same post, Kopf explains that he believes that the Court is diminishing its own prestige by deciding cases such as Hobby Lobby:
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    In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a "person" entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate because that corporation was "closely held" by family members. To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.
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    To most people, the decision looks stupid 'cause corporations are not persons, all the legal mumbo jumbo notwithstanding. The decision looks misogynist because the majority were all men. It looks partisan because all were appointed by a Republican. The decision looks religiously motivated because each member of the majority belongs to the Catholic church, and that religious organization is opposed to contraception. While "looks" don't matter to the logic of the law (and I am not saying the Justices are actually motivated by such things), all of us know from experience that appearances matter to the public's acceptance of the law.
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