Back in July the 6th Circuit turned back a challenge to the Affordable Health Care act’s birth control coverage mandate, on the common sense grounds that while Mitt Romney may think they’re people, they can’t have religions. I thought I wrote about it at the time, but can’t find the post.
Anyway, this decision is one of those no-brainers that anyone with the least understanding of the law could predict. So, naturally, we now have a bunch of looney Republican judges ruling the other way:
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — the second most influential bench in the land behind the Supreme Court — ruled 2-1 in favor of business owners who are fighting the requirement that they provide their employees with health insurance that covers birth control.
Requiring companies to cover their employees’ contraception, the court ruled, is unduly burdensome for business owners who oppose birth control on religious grounds, even if they are not purchasing the contraception directly.
“The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase; instead, it occurs when a company’s owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote on behalf of the court.
Legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to ultimately pick up an appeal on the birth-control requirement and make a final decision on its constitutionality.
via The Hill
The article is not clear on whether the employer in this case is a corporation, but the reference to “companies”, and the fact that the entity has 400 employees practically guarantees that we are not dealing with an individual here. So, here we have an anomaly (see my previous post for more on this subject). The owners of this corporation are not liable for its misdeeds in a court of law. In other words, they and the corporation are seperate entities when it comes to their pocketbooks. But they are indistinguishable when it comes to their alleged consciences, at least when those firmly held beliefs are consistent with the right wing views of the DC Circuit. As I’ve written before, this raises all kinds of interesting possibilities, for whose to say what strange beliefs corporations might find themselves impelled by self interest conscience to adopt. But rest easy, if the Supreme Court agrees with this abomination, it will likely restrict the result to the facts, much as it did in Bush v. Gore.
This, by the way, is the court that has three vacancies that Obama can’t fill because of Republican’s filibusters. Time to go nuclear.
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