We know that the Catholic church takes its consecrated wafers, which they believe have been transformed into the body of Jesus, very, very seriously, as PZ Myers (among many others) can attest when they treated it as just another wafer and triggered a massive outcry.
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We tend to think of the US Supreme Court as being sharply split along ideological lines. But as this article points out, that is because the media focuses on a few high profile cases which have an elevated profile precisely because they are split that way. In actuality, there is a remarkable degree of agreement among the justices in their rulings, with even the lowest level being 66% between Ginsburg and Thomas
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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