According to a recent news story,
“Democrats in Congress announced Wednesday they are filing legislation in an
attempt to undo the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that certain companies
can deny workers’ contraception coverage on religious grounds.”
The Supreme Court Ruling that Democratic Congressmen, among
them Connecticut’s entire U.S. Congressional Delegation, wish to overthrow is Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. It is important
to understand that the ruling was a very narrow one,
which is to say it was a decision that sought an accommodation between
plaintiffs and defendants in the case, though one would hardly deduce this from
the hysterical response to it by abortion on demand Democrats.
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s response may be found on his
senatorial site. His remarks are reproduced below. The Blumenthal response is a joint declaration. U.S. Senator
Chris Murphy also signed off on the media release, and both senators
co-sponsored a new bill, the Newspeak named Protect Women’s Health from Corporate
Interference Act , “introduced today to restore contraceptive coverage
guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act and to protect coverage of other health
services from employers who want to impose their beliefs on employees by
denying benefits.”
The Hobby Lobby decision affects only certain kinds of birth
control. The owners of Hobby Lobby themselves provide birth control pills to
their employees. But the Hobby Lobby owners drew a red line at providing their
employees with abortifacients. It may be important to point out here that those
bringing the suit were not Catholics operating under the thumb of the
Pope (see Thomas Nast's nasty anti-Catholic cartoon top left). Because the suit touches only the
matter of abortifacients, the decision of the court does not touch the larger
question: May employers with religious scruples refuse to provide ordinary
birth control pills to their employees?
This important distinction is not mentioned in the media
release issued by Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy the operative assumption of
which is that the Hobby Lobby decision upsets the entire birth control
apple cart.
Here is the Blumenthal-Murphy response to the high court
decision as issued in their joint “made in Washington DC” press release:
Wednesday,
July 9, 2014
(Washington,
D.C.) — In the wake of the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision, U.S.
Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) co-sponsored
legislation introduced today to restore contraceptive coverage guaranteed by
the Affordable Care Act and to protect coverage of other health services from
employers who want to impose their beliefs on employees by denying benefits…
“Shamefully, the Supreme Court has held that
the religious rights of corporations trump the personal freedoms of American
women. I am proud to join with my Senate colleagues in co-sponsoring
legislation to right this wrong and to restore critical access to contraceptive
coverage for countless American women. Religious liberty is about the right to
practice your religion, not the right to impose your religion on your
employees,” Blumenthal said.
“Last week’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
represents an unprecedented power grab by five unelected men on the Supreme
Court. The immediate effect of this decision is that a woman’s boss can be the
one calling the shots about her health care decisions – an outrageous intrusion
into a woman’s personal life that needs to be reversed. Thousands of women of
all ages and backgrounds in Connecticut rely on this essential health benefit
every single day and bosses shouldn’t be allowed to take it away because they
find it objectionable. Our bill will restore this critical Affordable Care Act
requirement and allow women to take back control of their health care decisions,”
Murphy said.
“After five justices decided last week that
an employer’s personal views can interfere with women's access to essential
health services, we in Congress need to act quickly to right this wrong,” said
Senator Murray. “This bicameral
legislation will ensure that no CEO or corporation can come between people and
their guaranteed access to health care, period. I hope Republicans will join us
to revoke this court-issued license to discriminate and return the right of
Americans to make their own decisions, about their own health care and their
own bodies."
Note especially Mr.
Blumenthal high dungeon rhetorical swoon:
“Shamefully, the Supreme Court has held that
the religious rights of corporations trump the personal freedoms of American
women. I am proud to join with my Senate colleagues in co-sponsoring
legislation to right this wrong and to restore critical access to contraceptive
coverage for countless American women. Religious liberty is about the right to
practice your religion, not the right to impose your religion on your employees.”
Nowhere in the decision does one find the court holding that “the religious rights of
corporations trump the personal freedoms of American women,” pot boiler
rhetoric that comes straight from pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood.
It may be noted for the record that Mr. Blumenthal’s Chief of Staff, Laurie Rubner,
served as Vice President for Public Policy for Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider that stands to
lose large sums of money if – to be sure, not a likely possibility -- some few members of the state’s Congressional delegation should rediscover their
Catholic roots. On the matter of abortion, three of the seven members of the
Connecticut Congressional Delegation are heterodox Catholics. If all Catholics
voted in support of their religious precepts – the false reigning presumption
of pro-abortion legislators – religious rights might be more widely supported.
But that is not the case. The presumption itself is a hobgoblin dangled before
the public by pro-abortion politicians, some of them Catholic, all of them
libertines, on their ceaseless hunt for votes.
Mr. Blumenthal and
his wife, according to Rabbi Andrew Sklar, are members of the Greenwich Reform
Synagogue, where Mr. Blumenthal is an “extremely visible” member of the
community. The synagogue, in one of the state’s most affluent towns, is
described by its rabbi as “diverse, open” and as a “very progressive
congregation.”
Mr. Murphy is a
nondenominational Christian.
Reform Judaism in
the United States, also known as Liberal Judaism and Progressive Judaism, is affiliated
with the Reform Jewish movement in North
America, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Under Reform Judaism, beliefs, practices and
organizations must be made compatible with the surrounding culture. Reformed Jews
regard traditional Jewish law as a set of general guidelines rather than
restrictive, culturally transcendent proscriptions.
There is no “wrong”
in the Hobby Lobby decision that will be corrected by the Orwellian titled Protect Women’s Health from Corporate
Interference Act.
The new legislation
supported by Mr. Blumenthal and Murphy in the Senate and the five Democratic
members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation is designed to subvert
the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA),
a law, a Courant story reminds us, that was “passed by Congress in 1993.”
The stated purpose
of RFRA, which was passed by a unanimous U.S. House and a near
unanimous U.S. Senate with only three dissenting votes and later
signed into law by Mr. Clinton, was to prevent the promulgation of laws that substantially
burden a person's free exercise of religion -- like the Protect Women’s Health from Corporate Interference Act, which would
give the force of law to what is essentially an administrative interpretation
of Obamacare. Nowhere in the law does Obamacare explicitly prohibit religious minded people from
adhering to scruples more confining than those that bind neither
Connecticut’s two senators or the state’s five Democratic U.S. House members. The proper course
for a congressman who objects to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling anchored in a law
that passed through congress by an overwhelming majority is to repeal the
foundational law, not to subvert it by passing a Constitutionally dubious law.
The remediating Protect Women’s Health from Corporate
Interference Act very likely will not pass Constitutional muster, so long
as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution still prevents the Congress –
and by extension all other legislative bodies – from creating laws that “prohibit
the free expression” of religion, a clause that is not limited to religious
speech alone but which embraces religious acts as well, whether or not they are
performed in or out of church buildings. The First Amendment still permits one
to BE religious in a Public Square in which faith may be practiced by both clergy
and the laity.
The proposed new law
supported by Connecticut’s entire Democratic Congressional Delegation, properly
viewed, is a campaign device designed to inflame and encourage pro-abortion on
demand groups to give their votes and money to progressive politicians.
The whip no doubt
will serve its purpose, but those of us who have a lingering affection for the
First Amendment should bravely resist the lashes.
Comments
Our bill will restore this critical Affordable Care Act requirement and allow women to take back control of their health care decisions
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Murphenthal doesn't so much want to stop employers from pushing the gynos around as that it wants the federales to be able to do it; allow American women to be required to have everything in the world a politician can possibly imagine.
The Constitution gives the federal government no authority to require any person or entity to buy health insurance, with or without full gyno-community satisfaction. The Obamacare ruling, brought to you by three nominal Jews, and two nominal Catholics, in fact deprives individuals of liberty, but also eviscerates whatever was left of the notion that the federal government is limited to powers enumerated. That Blumphy sees the HobbyLobby case as a deprivation of rights shows how far up its gnostic side its noggin is lodged. Does one find this little regard for the Constitution in people who haven't gone to law school, or is it a testament to the superlative professionalism and fanaticism of our attorney class?
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French girls they want Cartier
Italian girls want cars
American girls want everything in the world
You can possibly imagine
JAGGER, MICK/RICHARDS, KEITH