You would think that those religious people who insist on inserting religion into government would have been satisfied with the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Greece v. Galloway case that said that it was not unconstitutional for governmental entities to open their meetings with prayers.
[Read more…]
A federal judge ruled on August 7, 2014 that a privately-funded Ten Commandments monument that on July 4, 2011 was placed on the lawn in front of the city hall of the town of Bloomfield in New Mexico must be removed by September 10, 2014 as a result of suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of two people, one of whom Jane Felix is a Wiccan, a high priestess with the Order of the Cauldron of the Sage.
[Read more…]
Ryan Devereaux reports that five people have now sued the government for infringing on their civil liberties by placing them on no-fly lists and otherwise harassing them using its massive database to put them on watch lists and used it to pressure them.
[Read more…]
The Satanic Temple, the group that seeks to put its monument on state grounds that have allowed things like the Ten Commandments, has said that by virtue of the rights granted to religious organizations by the Hobby Lobby verdict (authored by justice Samuel Alito), it will exempt its own employees from state laws that restrict rights to abortions.
[Read more…]
In April, I wrote about a legal challenge to Obamacare in which opponents had argued that the text of the ACA law only allowed state health exchanges to provide subsidies for the health insurance premiums and that the federal government should not have been allowed to provide subsidies through its own exchanges in those states that decided against setting up their own exchanges.
[Read more…]
The Daily Show commented on the Hobby Lobby case and had as their guest Dahlia Lithwick to discuss the implications of that case and also the inconsistent way that the US Supreme Court views free speech rights and buffer zones.
[Read more…]
While the majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case argued that it was a limited decision affecting a narrow class of companies, it seems to be part of a general strategy of the US Supreme Court to slowly but steadily encroach on the rights or women and workers for the benefit of corporations.
[Read more…]
There was another important 5-4 ruling yesterday in the case of Harris v. Quinn, where the US Supreme Court dealt a blow to unions by saying that public employees cannot routinely be required to join labor unions or to support them by paying dues. (You can read more on that case here and here and here.)
[Read more…]
It looks like Hobby Lobby has won its case. In a 5-4 decision along the usual lines (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy, all of whom are Catholics by the way), the court said that ‘closely held corporations’ (a specific type of for-profit corporation) each owned and controlled by members of a single family cannot be forced to provide contraception coverage for its employees and should be given the same accommodations as the government gave nonprofit organizations.
[Read more…]