The Hobby Lobby ruling by the Supreme Court today is illustrative of just how urgently we need to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution as well as an amendment to abolish corporate “personhood” and money as “speech.” This ruling graphically displays the need for these two constitutional amendments as it empowers corporations’ so-called “personhood” while ignoring the actual personhood of 51% (!) of the population. It demonstrates how far the current court is willing to go to enshrine corporate constitutional rights while emboldening religious fanatics and stomping on the human rights of women. It is the perfect example of religious oppression and tyranny masquerading as religious “freedom” and the corporate 1% using any excuse to minimize costs and maximize profits.
The radical religious right has infested the Supreme Court in addition to Congress in the persons of particularly Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, and Antonin Scalia, who in turn were enabled by the other right-wing male members of the court. What is unbelievable is that the anti-abortion fanatics like Hobby Lobby have now gone after birth control, revealing their hypocrisy regarding abortion given the fact that birth control prevents abortions, which is no surprise to those of us who have always known their agenda. They are not the least bit interested in “life,” caring nothing for the lives of women, only feigning angst for non-viable zygotes, gametes, and fetuses because what they are actually interested in is invading and negating women’s bodily sovereignty, privacy, autonomy, and agency so that women have no freedom or control over their lives.
The attitude of fundamentalist fanatics is not only sexist, but male supremacist; women are seen as nothing more than sexual commodities, brood mares and chattel whose bodies are property to be allocated and controlled. These Christian fascists think they have the right to dictate to women their most intimate decisions about their bodies and their sexuality, an outrageous discrimination against only females as women are the only persons who use prescription birth control or need abortions and because procedures like vasectomies for men are not excluded. Their goal of female enslavement and bondage through forced childbearing is abundantly clear.
As Ginsburg warns, this decision will be applied broadly and open the floodgates for corporations to claim all kinds of exceptions to abiding by the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, whether it be certain procedures such as pap smears, mammograms, or even denying women equal pay. If it’s ok to discriminate against women in one way, why wouldn’t it be in another? This is just the beginning in terms of lawsuits to give corporate “persons” the right to openly discriminate against real female persons, an expansion of rights for artificial entities stolen from our Bill of Rights intended for natural persons, and these kinds of rulings will continue until we pass a 28th and a 29th amendment to the Constitution to end discrimination based on sex and to end corporate personhood and money as speech.
NOW, AAUW, and PDA are among the groups working for the passage of the ERA. To speak out about Hobby Lobby, go to:
Undo Hobby Lobby! and #JointheDissent on Twitter.
For more info see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/us/hobby-lobby-case-supreme-court-contraception.html?_r=0