Of today's first big win for the Opus Dei Court's double-header,
Charles Pierce looks at a ruling "so obviously discriminatory toward ladies and their ladyparts that no explanation seems necessary." The majority opinion certainly broadcast that, loud and clear—
This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates, that is for blood transfusions or vaccinations, necessarily fail if they conflict with an employer's religious beliefs.
So Pierce suggests—
... let us look also at the religious discrimination embedded in the Court's logic. There are established religions in this country—Jehovah's Witnesses, to name one—that forbid their members to accept blood transfusions and to resist vaccinations. These are not small things. They are the basis for Christian Science. There have been religious objections to compulsory vaccinations going back to a movement among some clergy in Boston in the late 18th century. Until such time as a Jehovah's Witness owns a multibillion-dollar scrapbooking empire, and thereupon declines to offer blood transfusions to the employees of said company, and until such time as someone pushes that case all the way up the ladder, it looks very much to me like the Court, in limiting today's finding in this way, has decided to define what are acceptable religious beliefs... And, moreover, the Court's curious limit as described above lends an undue amount of credence to specific manifestations of Christianity—namely a segment of fundamentalist Protestantism, and the conservative elements of Roman Catholicism.... Garrett Epps argued, convincingly, that a ruling like the one handed down today would privilege some religions over others. In fact, I would argue, as a lifelong Papist, that this decision is nothing if it is not the clearest effect of having three conservative RC's on the Court at the same time and, as such, it has privileged conservative (and politically active) Christianity over all other forms of religion, including other forms of Christianity itself.
Pierce on the other big case,
the anti-worker one—
... the conservative majority among the Nine Wise Souls once again played their favorite game of coring out a precedent while, simultaneously, chickening out on what they really wanted to do, but can't do, at least until a couple more of their ideological bro's come on board because, otherwise, they might scare Anthony Kennedy into common sense, and none of them wants that. What happened in this case happened to (for the most part) poor women doing one of the most thankless and necessary jobs that there is—home health-care workers. ... Another delightful 5-4 decision held that unions could not extract fees from all state employees working in specific fields. However, it left weakened, but intact, the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board Of Education, in which the court held that public employees could be compelled to pay for collective bargaining. (The plaintiff in the Harris case was a woman caring for her disabled son at home and she argued that it was unfair for her to have to pay a fee to the SEIU to cover collective bargaining.) Writing for the majority, on the biggest day he's had on the Court since smart people were telling us what a moderate he was, Justice Samuel Alito made it plain that he didn't think much of the Abood decision, but that he didn't have the votes (yet) to blow it up entirely. He referred to it as an "anomaly," and said it was decided "on questionable grounds."...
...
To Samuel Alito and three of his colleagues, health-care workers in Illinois are now freer than they were yesterday, just as the butchers of New Orleans were made more free in 1873, because they no longer have to contribute to organizations through which their wages might rise, and through which they might collectively improve their lives.
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