What if Hobby Lobby said a woman can not come to work if she was menstruating? Would we even be having a discussion or would we just assume that was such a backwards, primitive belief? Exactly how far into public debate would that topic get before it was shot down completely? Birth Control pills are just marginal enough they can get away with the debate. 100 years from now the debate on this specific topic is going to look outdated, primitive and backwards. Why do we have to wait to satisfy some uptight religious people???
It’s not marginal so much as not very important. Ensuring that all Americans can work is a compelling government interest. Telling women they can’t come to work for a week every month is quite the hardship. Telling them that they have to pay for their own birth control is a very minor hardship, if it even is one at all. Since Hobby Lobby tends to be pretty generous in their pay and benefits(religious faith does have its good sides), it’s less of a problem for their employees to not get free contraception as it is for say, Wal-mart employees.
Then there’s the compelling interest of the government to want people of faith to fully participate in the economic life of the country. If people of faith know that they can’t start businesses because they’ll be forced to violate their faith if they do, then that will reduce economic growth and job opportunities slightly.
BTW, I agree with you that there is a wall of seperation between church and state. I just disagree on what that means. What you are describing, as I said on page 1, is more like a door that only one side can open. A wall prevents both sides from interfering with the other. If the government can start interfering in religious matters, then it’s only fair that religion start directly lobbying the government, endorsing candidates, donating money, etc.
To be honest with you I don’t really care about birth control pills being denied. Most women can afford them. it is the precedent of “violating your faith” that is dangerous. And that is not a slippery slope. I can think of a dozen things that staunchly religious fundamental people don’t like or would outlaw/ban if only they could.
I think it is a stupid and unreasonable goal.
You are not impressing me by defending Bill Cosby
I have heard of this. DOyou have specific examples of how it went wrong?
Well, not yet it’s not. The civil issue is that the doctor can let their religious bias prevent the patient from receiving a service.
There is a difference between the government preventing party A from projecting their religious bias onto their employee’s and the government telling them they can not hold said position. In this case SSM works better than birth control. The government is not saying clerks have to accept SSM, only that their religious bias can not prevent from issuing a marriage licence for a SSM.
Religious people are the only ones who get “confused” over what is and is not a freedom. I’ve never heard an Atheist or an Agnostic make the assertion that enacting a religious bias = freedom.
YOu’re right, but the slippery slope has a stop: strict scrutiny.
Well, yeah, but as a general principle we probably shouldn’t go to an alien planet less developed than us and start introducing technologies and social concepts they simply can’t deal with yet. And that principle came from a work of fiction. Heck, science fiction has driven so much scientific discovery. So it’s not weird to think of religion as driving a lot of our morality. Sure, there’s a lot of bad stuff in the Bible. The Bible was a reflection of its time in many ways. But it was also ahead of its time in others. Where it was a reflection of its time, we learned to move past it. Where it was ahead of its time, we’re still trying to live up to it. Even if we don’t believe in it.
Then consider it me degrading myself.
Yeah, wartime gave him the opportunity to implement a lot of his ideas, and while some of them worked well in the context of mobilizing the country for war, others were unnecessary and harmful, such as persecution of people for speaking out against the war. But the New Deal is where the logic was applied to peacetime and the parts where they tried to actually control production and demand didn’t work well at all and were quickly abandoned. Wilson and FDR actually thought competition was wasteful and harmful, which is a sensible idea in isolation(why would two different companies producing the same widget be useful and companies go out of business due to competition, throwing people out of work!), but as we pretty much all agree now, competition is not only beneficial but in 99% of industries, a must.
That being said, those ideas never got a chance to do much harm here. Europe is another matter entirely. The concept that “our betters” could organize the economy and the nation as a whole was put to the full test and found wanting. That’s probably why those ideologies were so warlike. War makes those ideas look good for a time, whereas in peacetime it’s just tiresome.
Usually that’s not allowed. I know there are a few exceptions, such as I don’t think any doctor can be required to perform an abortion, but for the most part doctors are expected to treat patients.
The abortion issue is mostly moot anyway, as are blood transfusions, because doctors can choose what to specialize in, thus avoiding the problem of having to do procedures they have a moral objection to. But if a doctor didn’t want to treat a gay man, that would not be legal.
Which eats up a lot of political capital and takes away from dealing with real issues, like cancer and global warming and overpopulation and hunger… the culture wars, as existing to keep the peons busy arguing… I think there is a certain amount of credibility to that idea. So a simple rule: no religious bias.
Actually you’re wrong. If Jesus/God had made 12 commandments, and included, allways wash your hands three times a day and beware of rats, rats are evil, keep away from rats (black plague) we could of saved MILLIONS of lives. Neither washing hands nor avoiding rats would of been “too much to comprehend”.
I’ll respond to your comments on Woodrow Wilson at another time. That might even be worth a separate thread…
The “100 years from now” argument is not leading us anywhere. For one, you cannot prove what will or will not be a majority opinion in 100 years. It remains a matter of speculation.
And for another: It seems quite likely to me that 100 (or 200 or 500) years from now, some of the views that you and I hold dear will be considered outdated. That does not do anything to change the value they have for us now. You cannot ask someone to abandon a view that you disagree with, because of your claim that in 100 years it will be considered outdated.
Well, if it came out of the same book where the hero casts demons out of people and casts the demons into pigs and then sends the pigs over a cliff, and this is portrayed as something that actually happened, well I have - no problem - asking them to abandon an outdated view from that book. The fact that they have deep feelings about the book is really not my fault is it?
That’s why I don’t judge our ancestors too harshly. If there’s an afterlife where we can see what’s happening down on Earth, then we’ll be treated to the spectacle of all sorts of moral values we held dear being regarded as barbaric and ignorant. Much of which will be simply because it will be more convenient to be “good” in the future. A lot of our barbaric practices evolved naturally as survival mechanisms. So you figure if this lab-grown meat thing works out, we’ll be looked back at as just awful people because we raised animals for the sole purpose of slaughtering and eating them. Which isn’t wrong, but it’s easy to judge when you can’t grow your meat in a lab.
Except that I am not going to deny that raising animals to just to eat them is morally wrong. It is. I admit it. And I continue to do it. Let people in the future judge me. I will continue to judge people in the past.
To an extent yes. But a lot of our moral preening is based on the relative ease and convenience of our lives. Did you ever get into that zombie apocalypse thread about being holed up with a bunch of racists who would make your minority buddies leave but let you stay? It’s easy for me to be good. I’ve never had to do a bad thing to make my life better, or to be able to go on living, period. Except eat meat from slaughtered animals. I really hate that I do that and I respect vegetarians a great deal. I’ll have significantly less respect from people munching on their lab grown burger and saying, “Yeah, those people in the 20th century were really horrible.” Doing the right thing will involve zero effort on their part.
Yeah that was kind of an interesting thread. But we are getting distracted. The point is this is supposed to be a modern, technological, enlightened, scientific country. They don’t have these religious debates in Europe or Japan. They have outgrown primitive supersition.
Somewhat. Germany still has Sunday law. They started Sunday law because it was Christian, kept it because it was pro-worker, but why does Sunday matter? Why not Saturday or Friday? Are German workers in danger of working seven days a week if they don’t mandate Sunday as a day off?
I get your point though. But they don’t respect religious freedom a whole lot. France is the worst offender, making a special point of messing with Islamic practices.
As a European I can assure you that this is not true. 
We do not always debate the same topics as you do. (We *did *have the circumcision debate though.)
You seem to change the subject a lot. You said that “Hobby Lobby is trying to limit other people’s choices based upon religion.” I easily proved that statement untrue, for the second time. You know that what you posted was false and embarrassingly inept, so you don’t say anything more about that topic. Instead you change the subject, claiming that " If they say we don’t want to provide service because of religious objection, that is discrimination."
This is also untrue. Hobby Lobby buys insurance that doesn’t cover a few specialized forms of birth control, though it does cover most types of birth control. How is this discrimination? Do you even know what the word “discrimination” means?
Further, even if Hobby Lobby did discriminate, so what? Civil rights law prohibits private companies from discrimination based on certain classes, but not from discriminating generally. This has been explained to you before, at length, in the thread started by Rucksinator. In that same thread, you said that you were fine with certain types of discrimination.
My objection to the Supreme Court decision is that Hobby Lobby was never asked to directly partake in the practices that they object to on the grounds of their religion. All they were asked to do was to pay for an insurance that in turn would pay for the means to be used in that practice. Pretty indirect. To me that sounds the same as if a person whose religious beliefs are strictly pacifist refused to pay taxes on the grounds of these taxes being used to fund an army.
If what they thought in 1789 is irrelevant, then the Constitution is irrelevant. So why did you start the thread?
I assume from your posts that you are either atheist or agnostic, and you seem rather confused over the terms. “Wall of separation” does not mean “religion is icky and Robert163 should decide everything based on what he thinks will happen a hundred years from now”. I hope that clears things up.
Regards,
Shodan
There are literally thousands of examples of that happening.
Well, I’m an atheist (and thus have a particular interest in the protection of religious minorities), and I think you’re way off-base in your assertions here. For one thing, how do you square your ideas with the existence of the free-exercise clause?
There’s a compelling government interest in collecting taxes. There’s also a compelling government interest in ensuring access to birth control, but the method disputed in the Hobby Lobby case (an employer mandate to cover them under insurance plans) wasn’t found to be the least restrictive means of achieving it.
Most European countries don’t have formal church-state separation. They guarantee freedom of religion but not non-establishment.
Western Europe, outside of Ireland, likes to think itself secular. They don’t generally ban things like birth control or homosexuality on explicit religious grounds. At the same time, symbolic things like state-funded churches exist. The main issue is really the unrecognized survivals of religious belief – for example, the opposition to genetic modification of food crops, which is purely based in “you shouldn’t tamper in God’s domain” but gets a lot of support in supposedly secular societies because people don’t examine where their beliefs come from. Cultural inertia is a big thing.