This supreme court decision has me pissed off for all the reasons you might expect, plus a few more. And not just on the part of the justices. But I want to do due diligence to where err'ybody screwed the pooch on this one.
The argument against providing contraceptive care to women:
1. We're forced to pay, with taxes, for many things we don't necessarily agree with. It's part of being a functioning society. Sorry Hobby Lobby, you don't deserve special rights on that one or else I wouldn't have to pay for war or the salaries of a useless congress.
2. Your entire argument is predicated on the assumption that contraception and abortion are the same thing. Medically speaking, they're not. If they were, you'd run down some very tricky territory wherein doing anything to prevent pregnancy becomes a sin, including abstinence. As such, the claim that it's a "sincerely held religious belief" isn't something I buy. Your definitions are just poorly constructed. Start over and do it better.
3. You still provide vasectomies on your plan? Okay, Hobby Lobby, you've gone past ethical hypocrisy and straight into the territory of legal hypocrisy. The argument loses any weight it has and the facade you've cast on the issue being about "religious beliefs" falls, revealing your desire to either control women's bodies or at least get a free pass from funding the personal medical choices of individual human beings with tax payer dollars. In both cases, you're shitlords.
4. No one has the right to decline anyone medical treatment that is either a health concern or measurably improves their lives. That's the whole point of this healthcare system. Shut up and deal with it.
5. The ability to argue against using taxpayer dollars for anything you deem an affront to your "sincere" religious beliefs is unbelievable. It paves the way for countless absurd arguments that allow individual liberties to surpass the rights of people to be happy and healthy. Moreover, it provides for corporations to surpass those rights as well. This means if it's someone's "sincere" religious belief that hiring black people is immoral, they're allowed to be racist. And since you seem okay with removing the barrier between church and state on this, we're forced to reconcile the fact that this whole territory of ethics is totally subjective and we can pretty much make up whatever the hell we want to rationalize our prejudices.
At that point, we get into thought police; "It's my sincerely held religious belief that being a conservative is immoral, so I'm allowed to not hire someone based on their political beliefs."
6. You don't get to pick and choose. If you want the government and your employees to adhere to your strict moral code, you're going to have to put, in writing, exactly what your moral code is (that may take a while) and then we get to point out how you're profiteering (sin) using goods provided by foreign companies that use sweat shop labor (sin). Worth noting that I'm sure we'd also be able to catch you on about a million shitty technicalities since your code of ethics is based on a book that is almost entirely culturally irrelevant (as far as norms, practices, laws, expectations, and historical context goes) at this point...
7. Once you step into the territory of indirect harms being totally acceptable to inflict for religious reasons, you stand outside the door of direct harms. You're allowed to decide what medical treatments your employees get? What's to stop your ethics from demanding that you punish "unethical" behavior with physical force when it occurs in your workplace? What's to stop them from retaliating if your behavior is unethical based on their beliefs?
You see where this is going? It's a dumbass circle that spawns from you deciding that your arbitrarily-determined set of moral stances are allowed to circumvent those of the state. Which means yes, at some point, we do have to accept that there is going to be an imperfect "universal" ethics utilized by our government (spooky, I know) to prevent as much harm as possible.
Your personal quibbles fall outside this umbrella, and you should expect to get rained on as a result. But, by forcing the umbrella to come cover you, you've ripped a far larger hole in it, drastically increasing the number of people whose rights are doused just so you can feel personal ethical comfort.
Good on you, assholes.
My big complaint with the other side right now;
Stop comparing Viagra to contraceptives; this isn't some obvious hypocrisy. Contraception (or rather the prevention of pregnancy) is the ethical ground being argued by these corporations. Viagra is not a contraceptive. By their own ethics, Hobby Lobby is not being hypocritical. You're falsely conflating the issue of contraceptives vs. other drugs with male drug vs. female drug. If Hobby Lobby was arguing from the stance that they shouldn't have to provide healthcare for the personal choice to live a sexual life, then yeah, Viagra would fall under the realm of that and their position would be hypocritical. As it stands, you may not like it, but it's not a contradiction of their argued beliefs. It's BS that they think they can pick and choose, but to highlight Viagra here doesn't make much sense in the context of their argument.
Now for vasectomy? That is a totally valid comparison since they both serve the same function. In that way, Hobby Lobby is absolutely being hypocritical, and they deserve to be lambasted for it.
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As an aside, I get that you're frustrated that the 5 clowns who made this decision were all males. But I think there's an important concern in tandem here- whether anyone has the right to deny any other individual human being access to healthcare of any kind that is either a medical necessity or else improves a person's quality of life. I address this in #4 above. The precedent set by this case will be that if someone's "sincere" beliefs are that medical care is a sin, then they can refuse it to anyone. If the same 5 had agreed that vasectomies could be banned (I realize that's not the case due to the sexist nature of the argument), we'd be running up against the same moral dilemma in the long run. If we strive only to address that men have no say in women's health issues, then it won't be long before we run into the same (or a similar) problem again.
[My original perspective that people should have a say in issues relevant to others than themselves has been revised significantly based on an argument I had with myself where I talked myself into a corner. If it's an issue of personal health that doesn't affect another living being, no one else has the right to interject. Luckily, I'd only started to make my original position public once and I deleted it. Didn't make too much of an asshole of myself this time.]
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