I had the same assumption actually.
Ancestry told me I’m very English so please accept my apology on behalf of my people.
Pretty sure he’s from South Africa.
From his past posts, he was born in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and raised there, but is South African/British by descent. He has also called South African and Zimbabwe “his countries”.
I didn’t say they are never religious issues: I did say that “in the US, churches have worked hard to make these religious issues, successfully.” What I mean is that if you take Christianity as a whole, or Judaism as a whole, diachronically and cross-culturally, these are non-issues.
Since religion is a part of culture, it’s not really feasible to separate them completely, but American religion takes the form and focus it does because of American culture, not because of something inherent to Christianity or any other religion. Sure, you can look to the writings of Paul and find some justification our cultural attitudes, but there have been multiple cultures practising Christianity that just didn’t care as much about those. Pretty much all Christian cultures are sexist to a degree, and so are the ancient texts in which the religion is rooted, but beyond that most of the American Religious Right’s issues are America-specific.
Yeah, the early Church made the wise decision that if it had any hope of getting adult gentiles to convert in significant numbers, requiring them to undergo circumcision was probably not a good idea. And if they weren’t going to make the converts get circumcised, it wasn’t logical to make their children undergo it either.
This statement is a bit misleading. In most cases where employers provide health insurance in the U.S., they are paying for a large percentage of that insurance and the employee pays for a much smaller percentage. This is the type of employer provided insurance at issue in the case. Hobby Lobby was simply choosing an insurance plan for its employees that did not cover those things. A hobby lobby employee was free to purchase his/her own independent or supplemental insurance with whatever coverage they chose.
…in violation of the law at the time, until the religious nuts on SCOTUS intervened.
Actually all things considered it probably was. 
I’m two-finger typing on a tablet with autocorrect and mistakes are plentiful. But when called out on this, that explanation didn’t jump out at me and so I figured my Neanderthal brain had made an appearance and reflexively appologized.
And that’s no doubt widely available.
I’m sorry, that’s just bullshit. It’s extremely unfortunate that health insurance is marketed to employers, rather than to the end users. And this is just a blatant example of what goes wrong as a result.
And I’m sure not for religious reasons, right?
Not misleading in the slightest. Note that the SCOTUS ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby in this case specifically ruled (emphasis mine):
In other words, Hobby Lobby didn’t “just happen” to choose to offer a health insurance plan which didn’t cover reproductive health: they chose such a plan because their ownership believed that certain forms of contraception violated their own religious beliefs, and sought access to the same legal carve-out to the law (entitled the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) which religious non-profits receive.
Yeah, it’s like saying you’re not a racist and don’t hate Black people, you just choose to go to places where Black people are not welcome, but you’re not the one who made those places like that.
Yup.
But note, there don’t seem to be many health insurance plans that don’t cover blood transfusions or antibiotics despite both of those being deeply held religious beliefs. I wonder why… It’s almost like RFRA is really about interfering with women getting reproductive health care.
I’m sure the blood transfusion oversite will be corrected soon.
In this case, the people they were fighting totally fucking deserved it. Colonizers fighting worse colonizers is not a bad thing in my book. Go English!
No doubt. And I can’t understand why an organization who so vehemently opposes abortion would deny people the very thing that is most effective at reducing unwanted pregnancies, and in turn abortion. An organization that truly believes abortion is the killing of a human life should be practically handing out contraceptives, not making them more difficult to obtain.
Because people who are against abortion did not really reach that opinion through concern for babies or children. What they want is to see women punished for having recreational sex. Birth control does the opposite of that.
First, their public argument about this is typically that some contraceptives function by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, and this essentially acting as abortions.
But, more broadly, as @Dr.Drake says, they also believe that premarital/extramarital sex is sinful, and ready access to contraception removes the fear of unwanted/unplanned pregnancies that historically helped to discourage unmarried people from having sex. They believe that this has been a factor in the decline of “traditional families” (because they feel that the ability to have sex should be reserved for married couples), and a general increase in promiscuity.
They also believe that God commands humans to “be fruitful and multiply,” and contraceptives discourage people from having lots of kids.
Finally, the part that they probably don’t say out loud is that ready access to contraception empowers women, and gives them control over their own bodies, which they also frequently oppose.
So basically women should not have pre-marital or out-of-marriage sex, but that is perfectly OK for men … as long as it’s not gay sex.
Well, maybe not “perfectly OK” – they will argue that extramarital sex is a sin, regardless of gender. But, it’s a sin that man of them are more likely to overlook and tacitly accept for a man than it is for a woman.