A bunch of low rent, sun-crazed fascists on the border between Iraq and Syria declares the new Middle East Caliphate. This is supposed to supplant and succeed everything that came after Muhammad who hasn’t been around since the year 632, 1382 years ago.
Meantime, in Washington, DC, a quintet of low rent power crazed fascists has been creating a Caliphate here. Maybe call it an Evangelistiphate. The Supreme Court takes Hobby Lobby off the hook for birth control.
This has two immediate effects. First, it moves toward defining life as beginning at conception, something that is based on a biological fiction and second, it’s another slice in the death by thousands of cuts inflicted on reproductive rights.
We’ll look at this in a little more depth in a moment. But first, let’s brush off the latest Middle East nonsense.
Remember when Iraq and Iran were mortal and warring enemies. Apparently, those days are gone. The two countries are united in their opposition to the terrorist inspired fake country and seat of the new empire their “westernized” Muslim brothers claim to have created.
And the Ayatollahs will take care of this little problem, with the help of fighter jets shipped in prontisimo by that great advocate of world peace and freedom, Vladimir Putin.
And this, too has repercussions. Iraq, Iran and what’s left of Syria will dispose of the sun dried nuts. But they’ll be in Vlad’s debt for a long time, and not just financial debt… MORAL debt.
Still, they’ll solve this little challenge among themselves and probably pretty quickly. The Middle East doesn’t have a great track record for building fake new countries.
Here in the US, we have real trouble. Hobby Lobby, a chain of home project stores that sell “inspirational” books, Ball jars, ribbons, white glue, sewing thread, stuffed puppies and “World’s Greatest Grandma” coffee mugs, along with junk stones and other things for people with no life for which they substitute costume jewelry making.
The people who run the place, the Green family, have decided that because they go to church a lot and hear voices that tell them birth control is abortion and abortion is murder, they have the right to violate the Affordable Care Act, which requires birth control be made available to women who request it.
Jimmy down the block says “Hey, I don’t like abortion any better than the next guy, and I may LOOK pregnant, but I’m not. You don’t want an abortion? Don’t have one. Simple.”
A visitor asks “Jimmy, are you a good Christian?” “Yes,” he says, “good enough so I don’t believe in shoving it up your…” (expletive deleted.)
So, now we know: corporations are people. And people have a right to opt out of Obamacare.
One of the less-crazy Supreme Court Justices mentioned in a kind of off hand way that this ruling will affect far more than a chain of 500 strip mall rent payers and its 16-thousand employees.
There had been a long history of not exempting corporations from laws they don’t like based on religion or anything else. This ruling overturns that idea and opens up the floodgates.
This ruling is not the beginning of something, nor is it the end. You can count on the spreading of this disease.
We have an air force, too. But unlike Vlad and the Ayatollahs, we’re not likely to use it.
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Said by Other: Here is part of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent as quoted by Mother Jones Magazine.
- "Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…
- "Approving some religious claims while deeming others unworthy of accommodation could be 'perceived as favoring one religion over another,' the very 'risk the [Constitution's] Establishment Clause was designed to preclude."
- "The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield."
Ka-Boom!
Thanks, Ruth. We may not have laws anymore. But at least we have a warning.I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2014
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