@saul-degraw There is also the fact that land and realestate are finite goods and driving down wages might be good in some theoretical economic sense but it generally does not drive down the rent. Building only helps so much and possibly not at all in some areas.
What would help bring down the rent is reducing the monopolization of land, both by having people own their own property, and having a larger number of property owners renting to others. Right now real estate ownership is incredibly consolidated.
'More buildings' is not very helpful.
Incidentally, everyone always talks about regulation hurting the small guys, and yet no one seems to apply that to the housing market. I understand safety regulations and whatnot, but why aren't more libertarians out there protesting zoning rules defining minimum house sizes and density rules and whatnot?
I think common cause could easily be made with liberals on that...yes, they sometimes favor such regulations, but usually to stop slumlords and whatnot. Allow poor people to *buy* very small houses, or actually having a *proportional* rent, that's something else altogether.
This is a classic example of us liberals assuming 'low quality' means 'abuse', one of the most annoying misconceptions on my side of the political isle. Sometimes it does. People getting 'low quality' loans can cause a cycle of rollovers and is, indeed, abuse.
But sometimes it doesn't. Making everyone buy Air Jordan houses is idiotic, especially when the cost isn't due to safety or reduced pollution or anything, but simply *larger portions*. Because obviously no one would actually *choose* to live in 600 square feet, so it must be *banned*. (Except all those people who live in apartments with roommate, or people who live in college dorms. Those people don't count, somehow.) Liberals are stupid sometimes.
I'm not sure which way you're asking. Are you asking why it's okay to do cruel things, or not okay to do cruel and unusual things?
If the first: 'Cruel' does not mean 'unjust'. Cruel just means 'inflicting pain or suffering to others'. Strictly speak, *all* punishment is cruel. That is the entire premise of punishment, a deliberate attempt to cause pain or suffering. ('Punishment', of course, is just one of the purposes of the legal system, but the others are not important here. I'm talking about punishment specifically.)
However, the counts generally exclude trivial amounts of short-term suffering from 'cruel'. Trivial amounts of work, trivial amounts of embarrassment, etc. All sorts of innovative punishments are allowed if they basically are 'sentenced to do stuff that people regularly do for money', like holding a sign up or community service or whatever. If it's *less cruel* than imprisonment, than it's generally not thought of as 'cruel'.
As for why we don't allow *unusual cruelties', it's because the cruelties that are well know have *very specific restrictions*, and we know exactly how they work and exactly what limits are permissible.
And, with so few to choose from, we can easily make some sort of sliding scale of punishment. Mostly the cruelty is 'imprisonment' and we just adjust the time.
If we started allowing criminals to be sentenced to *random* cruelties, no one knows what sort of nonsense we might get. Well, actually, yes, the founder fathers *did* know exactly what sort of nonsense you could get, hence the rule.
While I agree that punishment not explicitly provided by statue would be unusual, I'm not actually certain that's what the phrase is intended to stop. Most of the time, punishments *are* provided by law.
I think 'unusual' is basically there to restrict 'cruel'. I.e., locking someone up for years is, in fact, fairly cruel...but it's a perfectly usual punishment, so is allowed.
Meanwhile, making someone stand on the side of the road holding a sign explaining their crimes is *unusual*, but it is not, in any meaningful way, 'cruel'. So it's allowed.
But something like denying access to a bathroom or medical care, is both cruel, as in, physically painful and humiliating, and unusual, in that it's not something that is prescribed under any law at all.
And an interesting fact is that the courts are perfectly willing to keep reconsidering what is 'usual'. Just because one place allows something by statue doesn't make it 'usual'.
As someone who lives in the South (North Georgia), I am forced to admit that, while the South has actually made up a lot of ground in removing prejudice, a lot of that was due to *Federal law*. Claiming to be better than other places because we're been on probation is not a very useful claim to make.(1)
A lot of hearts and minds have been changed over the years here, but you know whose didn't change?
The old white people who actually run the place. The people born in the 60s, and who came of political age in the 80s under Reaganism. What I guess would be called 'stage two racism', when pushback against the laws against racism started in earnest.
And their entire life has been seething anger at the government telling them racism is not acceptable. The people who still run around bashing hippies.
And now that the courts don't care, they can spring into action.
The joke is that most of the kids affected by this would honestly be baffled if someone explained this was what was going on. *They're* not the racists. Hell, their *parents* aren't the racists, not most of them them. It's the *grandparents*. (And the people running for elected office that pander to them.)
1) Although what is useful to point out is that it is not just the South, and has *never* been just the South. In a weird, twisted way, I think the Robert's Count was sorta right with that. Although non-stupid outcome would have been something like 'Legislatures cannot use civil right violations from older than twenty years the next time they put burdens on states.', which would have the added features of getting states that have cleaned up their act out from under it (Without having to go through a process) and perhaps making people understand that it happens other places, too, and *they* need to be covered.
One thing I feel I should point out, late as I am to the party:
While some forms of birth control (Although, interestingly, *not* the forms of birth control that people think.) can cause an egg to avoid implantation...
...everyone who considers it has failed to notice that something like 50% of fertilized eggs either fail to implant by themselves, or implant but fail to trigger 'pregnancy hormones', and get discard the next cycle.
So if a IUD has 95% chance of stopping ovulation, and a 10% *added* chance of causing the egg not to implant...uh, it just *reduced* the total amount of fertilized eggs that 'died'. Hell, it would reduce the chances *even if it reduced implantation by 100%.
Because without the IUD, let's say there were 100 fertilized eggs, and 50% 'died'. With it, there were 5 fertilized egg, and 60% or 100% or whatever died.
All contraceptives reduce the amount fertilized eggs massively. They reduce it so much that you *mathematically* have a net loss in 'number of discarded fertilized eggs', no matter *what* happens to the few that slip through.
The idea that 'pregnancy hormones causing lack of implantation or the fertlized egg to slough off' is idiotic. Women are *supposed* to have those hormones while pregnancy, and in fact they *stop* menstruation. A women on birth control is, *hormonally*, pregnant.(1) That is why it is prescribed for acne and whatnot.
Hell, they sometimes prescribe these 'birth control' hormones during in-vitro fertilization to make sure everything is ready for implantation. They have literally the opposite effect of ending pregnancies.
It just works as birth control because of the very happy side effect that women who are 'pregnant' do not ovulate, and thus can't *become* pregnant. (Which is why female hormonal birth control was so easy to invent...it's a natural state, there's a switch in women's bodies to turn off ovulation during pregnancy. And why male hormonal birth control is so hard to invent.)
1) Erm, at the base state of pregnancy. Actual pregnancy tends tn introduce a lot of other hormones also
@burt-likko I could find that as a matter of moral caution, they could have believed that these drugs are sometimes abortifacients because there appears to be some degree of scientific support that the drug can cause a fertilized egg to slough off of the uterine wall.
There actually is not any scientific support for that, nor does there appear to be any way such a thing could plausible happen. That entire assertions appeared in a *false* claim originally put forward by contraceptive companies in the 70s, that had literally no support, medically, and was quickly recanted. It was taken up by crazy anti-contraceptice lunatics who wanted to make contraceptives appear worse.
Hormonal contraceptives stop ovulation. They do this by mimicking pregnancy. They do not do a single thing to a fertilized egg, because *pregnancy itself* doesn't do anything to stop egg fertilization. We know this because it is entirely possible for women to *get pregnant* even after they have a fertilized egg. (That's what fraternal twins are, after all.)
The *only* reason that already-pregnant women do not end up with added extra embryos halfway through the pregnancy is the lack of them releasing eggs. Pregnancy, or fake pregnancy hormones, do not, in any way, shape, or form, stop implantation. Period. End of story. This is all insane fairy-tale land nonsense.(1)
Even *Plan B* works this way. Plan B is an emergency level of hormones to *immediately* stop ovulation, and it works because the fact is that fertilization works somewhat backwards than people think...sperm doesn't met egg halfway down, sperm goes in and sits there for a bit, and egg runs into it.
1) In fact, hormone birth control, considering it can stop or reduce menstruation (Like tri-cyclen and others), can actually makes it less likely an implanted egg will be 'flushed out'.
An interesting fact is that it is the Green's position as Hobby Lobby's directors that is actually requiring the action on their part.
Not their position as the stockholders/owners (Stockholders do not run a company), not their position as officers (As the directors could just hire some other officers to do that job.) It's their positions as directors, aka, members of the corporate board, the people ultimately running the corporation.
Directors are not paid. The Greens are paid, via corporate dividends, as stockholders. And they are paid, via normal paycheck, as CEO and CFO and whatever.
But they are not paid as directors.
It is a volunteer position that accrues no benefit, and they technically would suffer no damages if they did not continue to hold that position.(1) There's no reason they can't step aside as directors and let someone else come in and hire people to manage their insurance.
1) This might put their jobs as officers in jeopardy, but strictly speaking, as directors, they were supposed to hire 'the best people', not 'themselves'. They can't argue that some different board members might hire someone else, causing damages to themselves, without also arguing that they didn't do their fiduciary duty as directors to hire the best person for the job.
@michael-drew Their claim, whatever you think of it, is that they’re *participating* in the murder if they pay in contraceptives, but not if they pay in money. After all, they have to pay employees with something – paying with money is the least murder-promoting way to pay other than, I guess, paying in anti-abortifacient-contraceptives literature, which really doesn’t get the whole “paying” (with a thing of value) function accomplished.
This is probably their claim, but it is exceptionally silly.
Because they aren't paying in contraceptives. They're paying in insurance.
Has anyone noticed that, strictly speaking, it is more work to use insurance to buy contraceptives than buying them with cash? You can literally just *hand over* cash and get contraceptives, using insurance is a whole process. Having employees use insurance makes it a longer and more indirect process than having employees use cash.
Admittedly, it makes it *more expensive* for the employees, yes. But Hobby Lobby is not, and can not, argue that it has a 'right' to make employee compensation not got as far.
And now here's a weird hypothetical: Let's say that the government, for whatever reason, decided that corporations over 50 employees must pay those employees using direct deposit if the employee wants so.
And let's also postulate, in this universe, that abortion providers do not accept cash.
Does Hobby Lobby have an exemption to that law, under the logic that somehow paying people by directly putting money in their bank account makes it easier to get an abortion?
Oh, and that said: I don't disagree with the idea of them having standing, per se. But that's because I extremely dislike the idea of 'standing' stopping people from suing, and dismissing over 'standing' should be limited to things where people clearly have no interest in a case. And moreover, I'm of the opinion that the Supreme Court basically should be exempt from the rules of 'standing' on top of that.
And hence I'm not really the best judge as to whether they should have standing under the law. I am in favor of as lax an idea of 'standing' as possible.
I think the case should be dismissed, however. Not because of standing, but because 'a corporation deciding to not provide a employment benefit as required under the law' cannot possible be 'religious exercise' under the RFRA, because corporations cannot exercise religion.
And the Greens, while they can exercise religion, are not actually required to do anything. Well, except they do have a the fiduciary duty as directors of the corporation that they have voluntary taken on. If that duty interferes with their religious beliefs, they should probably, uh, stop volunteering to do that.
I am not comfortable at all with the notion that a local government can target a religious group – say by requiring businesses in its downtown area to be open on certain days of the week – and avoid anyone having standing to challenge it simply by pointing out that the business has a corporate form. Allowing the government to do that would be to allow it to de facto restrict the availability of the corporate form to favored religious groups.
What do you mean ' the availability of the corporate form'?
The Greens are stockholders. If Hobby Lobby is doing something the Green do not like, they have the right to sue Hobby Lobby, or sell their stock.
The Greens are directors. Directors functionally have no 'rights' at all, except to vote and whatnot. They have duties to comply with the law.
The Greens are officers. Officers also have duties to comply with the law, and also are employees so can sue Hobby Lobby under employment laws.
People have no right to own, or be employed, in a corporation with specific 'values'. Even if it is a corporation they are trying to create themselves.
That is a distinct entity they're creating. It is required to exist in certain very conscribed boundaries.
For example, it must have a CEO. It must hold an annual meeting of the shareholders. It must keep specific records. The name probably has to include 'inc', or 'co' or 'ltd' and can't be longer than 80 characters. It must submit certain activities to shareholder vote. It must recognize union votes. It must provide health insurance as defined by the ACA if over a certain size.
Oh, and I find myself completely baffled by your attempt to make that point. While non-profits don't have stockholders, they do have owners. Their members own them.
Its just that, unlike for-profits, their owners cannot transfer money out of the non-profit to themselves. That is, in fact, the difference between an 'stockholder' and a 'member'. Stockholders are entitled to a portion of the corporate profits, members are not. (The 'profits' of a non-profit, if the non-profit feels like distributing them, can only be distributed to other non-profits.)
(Which is why Cato's strange idea of calling members 'stockholders' is not just being ignored by the IRS, considering Cato profits *are* accruing to their owners. It's not just some fancy mis-naming. Their membership are serving the entire purpose of stock. It's like the people who set up Cato literally did not understand the concept of a non-profit, and thought that 501(c)(3) was just a place you could put normal corporations so they didn't pay taxes.)
Additionally, the claim “non-profit corporations … lack shareholders” is erroneous; while non-profit corporations TYPICALLY do not have shareholders, excepts like the Cato Institute exist.
Non-profits do not have shareholders by definition. They have members.
The Cato Institute is not an 'exception' to the law, it is simply abusing the word 'stock', or abusing the non-profit statues.
The Cato Institute has, confusingly, decided to call it's memberships 'stock', and make memberships behave like stock, including having one vote per 'membership' and allowing people to hold multiple memberships (Which is indeed legal) and making these memberships transferable via reselling and inheritance. (Which is, uh, not legal, as far as anyone can tell, although that's a weird gray issue. Memberships in non-profits are not supposed to be considered property.) and apparently have distributed payments directly to the members proportional to the amount of memberships they own. (Which is flat out, 100%, completely utterly illegal. That is literally a violation of the concept of 'non-profit'.)
That does not actually mean it does have stock.
Or, alternately, it isn't a non-profit at all, which appears to be the view that the IRS has started taking.
The fundamental problem with the Greens’ claims today is that they are not the ones who are asked by the Contraception Mandate to dispense the disputed drugs. Only Hobby Lobby and Mardel are asked to do this. The Greens are not obliged to do anything – and they are not Hobby Lobby. Corporations, even closely-held corporations such as Hobby Lobby, have long been held to have identities separate from individuals who own and control them, and their owners may be effectively compelled to act in the capacity of an agent of the corporation sometimes directly contrary to their wishes and desires as individuals.
This is exactly the point I keep making.
Although ' their owners may be effectively compelled' is confusing. That is true in this specific instance, but what can actually be compelled is the officers. It's just that's the same people here.
When faced with a choice between compliance with the law and the inevitability of drawing a crippling liability upon her ward, a fiduciary must set aside her own preferences and desires, and acts in the best interests of her ward. The minimum that a fiduciary can do in this case is to get out of the way of the corporation’s compliance with the law. A fiduciary who cannot do this for whatever reason, including a personal religious objection, is not relieved of her duty to act in the best interests of her ward.
Indeed. Hobby Lobby is required, by law, do something.
This means that their agents have a duty to that thing. And by their 'agents', we mean their officers, or someone that the officers have hired. If their agents do not wish to do that thing, it is the duty of the directors to remove and replace those agents.
It does not actually matter that the officers and the directors are the same people, and who the stockholders are is not relevant at all. (Stockholders do not have any say in the running of a corporation beyond selecting directors.)
If the officers of Hobby Lobby are uncomfortable with dealing with an insurance plan that provides contraceptive insurance, I suggest they ask their directors (aka, themselves) to hire another officer to do that, or that they themselves hire an employee to do that.
@jonathan-mcleod However, the declaration that is regularly made that corporations are not people seems blatantly false. I know that legally, this is true, but in reality, corporations are people. We can define it different ways, but corporations are the owners, managers, employees, etc. They’re the people that comprise the corporation. Hobby Lobby wouldn’t exist without the Greens or its other agents.
This is, in any sense of the word 'exist', incorrect.
The most obvious way to demonstrate this is to point out that if the Green sold all their shares of Hobby Lobby, and fired all employees, the corporation would still exist. Obviously, corporations need people to do things in the name of the corporation, but they don't need any specific people.
And they still exist even without any people at all. If a corporation somehow ends up existing without anyone authorized to represent themselves as the corporation, than the government itself will take over operation.
A corporation is not the people that make it up. A corporation is a legal fiction residing in the mind of the government, which has specific people entitled to attribute their own acts to that fiction. Those people can change. Those people can even not exist. The corporation will continue to exist until dissolved.
@jm3z-aitch Keep in mind what we’re actually asking of the Greens, from their perspective, which is to participate in the murder of humans. I think they’re wrong about that, and I’ll fight for policies that preserve the right to choice, but it’s not my or our place to force them to participate in what they define as atrocities and sins before God. In fact it’s rather an appalling thought that we would so substitute our judgement for them that we would compel them to participate in what they sincerely define as an atrocity and a grave sin.
If the Greens don't want to participate, then the Greens should get Hobby Lobby (Which, after all, they control) to hire someone else to operate their insurance program.
There is way too much conflating on 'them' and 'their behavior', which somehow means both 'the Greens' and 'Hobby Lobby'. Those are not the same entity.
If a corporation has someone that is morally opposed to complying with directives from the US government, the corporation can either fire that person, or just hire someone else to do that. There is absolutely no reason that could not happen here.
People need to stop pretending that 'Hobby Lobby' is somehow living inside the heads of the Greens.
@j-r In my humble opinion, spending money on politics is about the daftest thing that you can do, from an investment perspective. The Kochs and Adelstein and whoever else would get a much better return on their money if they drastically cut their campaign contributions and instead focused on lobbying. The fact that they do not is pretty good evidence that most of this is about sincere ideological beliefs and/or a vanity project.
I find myself somewhat agreeing with you. The reason have all this money in elections all the sudden is partially because people who want to do insane things in government are trying to force their people in.
This has...barely succeeded, and caused a hell of a lot of blowback, and has, at this point, crippled the political party they're using for that. Sure, if they keep pouring money into it, it will *keep* barely succeeding, but there is an immunity that builds up, especially since the other side has started calling out specific entities by name. (Which is one of the reasons I think it is very important to get rid of *dark* money.)
The problem with money in politics, in normal politics not the crazy stuff, is the lobbying, where large corporations stand there day and night telling politicians certain things, and there is no counter.
If we want to fix things, *that* is probably where we need to look first: The sheer volume of misinformation and nonsense that goes directly from corporations and industries into the ears of already-elected politicians.
So, I always ask those who don’t like these types of rulings the same question: where is the evidence, empirical or otherwise, that more money flowing into elections is actually a corrupting factor?
I think there's very little evidence that the money now allowed in *this* decision corrupted anything. Maximum total donations were never very justifiable.
However, I do think campaign money causes corruption, and in an ideal world candidate's access to money would be, in some way, *directly* proportional to how supported they are, which is something that donation limits are *trying* to mimic, but doing it very poorly. Instead of having people donate $5-$5000, we could instead have them sign a petition, and for each new signature they get $100. Or we put a cap on each donation of $1, and have a $99 dollar matching donation from the government.
That has obvious problems, but it would much more be in tune with the idea in this country that everyone should have an equal voice in politics.
Of course, with these complete end-runs around the campaigns, my ideas can't possibly work. What we need to do there is remove dark money and see what *next* needs fixing.
@zic Nobody debates the ‘provided without cost to the patient,’ and I’d live with small copays, for instance. As long as they were reasonable and potentially included exceptions were made when it created economic hardship.
Can I argue against requiring copays? ;)
Birth control is exactly the opposite of where we want copays. Copays are intended to slightly discourage medical services, so they are not abused.
Prescribed birth control cannot be 'abused', and it is not something we want to discourage by any amount. In fact, we want to encourage it. The more birth control out there the better.
Unplanned pregnancies are a *hideous* drain on the resources of this country, and ruin the lives of women and even men. Just from sheer *cost* reasons, stopping unplanned pregnancies is probably a better investment than *roads*.
...unless we want to go with the idea that sex by women is immortal and we want a 'sin tax' on it. Which is really the only reason we'd want to have women pay for birth control.
@zic I was actually trying to avoid the rape discussion; I felt my persuasion ought to be rooted in the world where women are reliably allowed agency and consent, at least when it comes to sex, if not pregnancy.
Fair enough.
It is true that a lot of rape results in pregnancy; as I recall, it happens at exactly the same rate as other unprotected sex.
I know what you are saying, shooting down that completely ludicrous nonsense that various Republicans have started yammering about how women's bodies can magically 'shut down' during rape. (Ignoring the fact that 'rape' is essentially how all species procreate, humans included until very recently, so reproduction protection *against* rape would have been evolutionary suicide. Then again, those people probably don't believe in evolution.)
But you've given too much ground. ;)
[Unprotected] rape can result in a *much* higher chance of pregnancies than consensual unprotected sex, depending on what you mean by 'unprotected sex'.
While calendar-based 'birth control' is not the greatest thing in the world, and is not 'protected sex', it *does* cut pregnancies by about two thirds if followed normally, and by more than 90% if followed perfectly. Presumably, rapists do not follow it.
And, on top of that, during consensual sex, there is higher chance of people not being in the correct position during ejaculation, if you understand what I'm saying. Whereas rapists tend to be rather unoriginal.
@jm3z-aitch As I note below, we don’t allow employers to simply increase pay sufficiently to cover it, or to let a female employee use it for some other purpose if they prefer.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, that could run to hundreds of dollars a month for some women, and more to the point, I find it completely astonishing that you think the solution to 'companies don't want to pay for insurance that includes birth control' is 'women should turn in their birth control receipts to the company and get directly reimbursed'.
Have you not noticed that there is currently a lawsuit out there about churches *signing a statement to indicate they weren't paying for contraceptives*, on the lunatic grounds that such a thing was a violation of their freedom? How do you think this 'Companies can just pay for contraceptives' thing is supposed to work?
Or are you one of the insanely large number of men who think *all* women can buy the $20 a month stuff at Target?
@zic And for the population most at risk of unplanned pregnancies, the decisions really will be “do I buy food” or “do I buy contraception.” The number one reason for second-trimester abortions, remember, is a woman not having the funds to get one earlier.
And let's remember the devastating consequences of lack of birth control, which are not really comparable to *any* other lack of medical service: There's no other medical service that, if you neglect it for a week, you suddenly have two decades of very large costs.
Since contraception is only a small part of the mandated preventative services, it’s only a concern because it’s deemed somehow immoral.
To everyone that thinks 'immorality' is relevant here (Not that it's immoral, but whatever.), I offer the fact that one out of four women will be raped in their lives, usually while they're of childbearing age.
In fact, interesting mathematical fact, a women who uses birth control correctly and has sex every day is less likely to become pregnant than a women who does not use birth control but does not ever choose to have sex. (Because of the aforementioned rape likelihood.)
But remember, everyone, we live in a universe where all sex is consensual and all birth control is less than a dollar a day and avoiding pregnancy has never really been that important in the lives of women.
@patrick Hobby Lobby doesn’t have standing to bring the RFRA claim, and neither do the Greens, if you’re asking me (which nobody is.)
But then, I have a very nuanced view of corporate personhood.
I mostly agree with you. The Greens have no standing. But Hobby Lobby does have standing.
And, as I've explained every time this is talked about, Mr. Hobby Lobby should take the stand and testify as to his specific religious beliefs, so we can determine that they are *his* beliefs, and not the beliefs of his owners or his employers. That's what we always do in cases like this. We don't let lawyers and whatnot speak for people, we make them get up and tell us what they sincerely believe.
Oh, Hobby Lobby is not a corporeal or even sentient entity? He's a legal fiction? Then how the *hell* is he claiming to have religious beliefs?
@dave It absolutely comes into play. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to the extent a sincere religious objection is raised to an otherwise neutral and generally applicable, the government must 1) demonstrate a compelling government interest and 2) show that the burden is the least restrictive alternative available. RFRA basically restored the strict scrutiny test that got severely undermined in the Employment Division v Smith decision.
You're begging the question.
'Not paying for something' is not an 'exercise of religion'.
And you can't burden someone's exercise of 'not paying for something' by making them pay for it.
I'm pretty certain the courts have already *specifically* addressed that concept, with people trying to avoid paying taxes to keep from supporting things against their religion.
@jm3z-aitch But Hobby Lobby wants to purchase some insurance for their employees, and you completely disregard that. Instead, you say “if you want to buy them some insurance, ou must buy them a complete package, as we define it.”
Didn't you *just* finish saying: One is to suggest that you’re implicitly assuming that if the insurer pays for your contraception that won’t affect your pay. At the extreme, you could be ensured contraception, but you still might be having to choose between using that $30 for food or for rent.
If Hobby Lobby buying contraceptive insurance *lowers* an employee's pay, then Hobby Lobby *not* buying health insurance at all raises their pay, by definition.
So, no, Hobby Lobby buying insurance that doesn't actually cover a specific medical condition is *not* better than it not providing insurance. Better to just give the employees the money directly, especially since the subsidies only kick in if the employer *doesn't* provide insurance.
Perhaps a better solution would be to let their employees buy a supercheap government insurance supplement that covers contraceptives?
Which lets everyone who doesn't have the specific medical condition of being 'a fertile female' not buy it, and lets the people who have cheap birth control just buy that directly. So the people who actually *buy* that supplement are only the people who have expensive birth control. Making that 'insurance'...not actually be a shared pool, and rather expensive.
Of course, by 'supercheap government insurance', perhaps you're imagining the government subsidizing it. Or, in other words, you're imagining the government essentially paying for contraceptives for people.
Yeah, that's a real workable solution you've come up with there. I'm sure there will be no objections to that.
A lot of people here seem to be assuming that women's contraceptive is some cheap thing they pick up off-brand at the Pharmacy. And it is...95% of the time. The reason it needs to be covered under insurance is the other 5% of the time, where something odd is needed. People who buy $10 a month pills are *not* the people who need contraceptives in their health insurance. Contraceptive is a medical issue, and hence can be *really expensive*.
Exactly like *all* medical insurance, in fact.
So let me ask people agreeing it's a human right, and saying that women should just buy it, are you actually suggesting that women get paid a few hundred dollars more each month so that, if they need that sort of contraceptive, they can buy it? (Or maybe companies could take a few dollars from everyone's paycheck to cover that, and put that in a pool to cover the more expensive ones. Or, instead of the company having to do that, they could get some third party to do that...oh, wait.)
Or are you people suggesting that only 95% of women need contraceptives?
Or maybe you think they should just buy *their own* insurance to cover contraceptives. But there's a reason we don't sell *individual medical items* insurance...people who need them would buy the insurance, people who don't wouldn't. You can't buy 'heart insurance', you can't buy 'knee insurance', and you can't buy 'contraceptive insurance'. Because only people who have heart problems, knee problems, or expensive contraceptives would buy it!
Luckily, we've already solved this problem. We're now requiring *everyone* to buy insurance policies that cover basically all medical problems. Hey, look at that.
The actual problem here is half the people here seem to think buying contraceptives is like buying food or something, that there is some fixed, low amount that women can pay to get contraceptives. (For some reason, they think this despite it being unlike how *any* other aspect of medicine works.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Just because you’re paranoid…”
@saul-degraw
There is also the fact that land and realestate are finite goods and driving down wages might be good in some theoretical economic sense but it generally does not drive down the rent. Building only helps so much and possibly not at all in some areas.
What would help bring down the rent is reducing the monopolization of land, both by having people own their own property, and having a larger number of property owners renting to others. Right now real estate ownership is incredibly consolidated.
'More buildings' is not very helpful.
Incidentally, everyone always talks about regulation hurting the small guys, and yet no one seems to apply that to the housing market. I understand safety regulations and whatnot, but why aren't more libertarians out there protesting zoning rules defining minimum house sizes and density rules and whatnot?
I think common cause could easily be made with liberals on that...yes, they sometimes favor such regulations, but usually to stop slumlords and whatnot. Allow poor people to *buy* very small houses, or actually having a *proportional* rent, that's something else altogether.
This is a classic example of us liberals assuming 'low quality' means 'abuse', one of the most annoying misconceptions on my side of the political isle. Sometimes it does. People getting 'low quality' loans can cause a cycle of rollovers and is, indeed, abuse.
But sometimes it doesn't. Making everyone buy Air Jordan houses is idiotic, especially when the cost isn't due to safety or reduced pollution or anything, but simply *larger portions*. Because obviously no one would actually *choose* to live in 600 square feet, so it must be *banned*. (Except all those people who live in apartments with roommate, or people who live in college dorms. Those people don't count, somehow.) Liberals are stupid sometimes.
On “Cruel and Unusual Punishment Bleg”
I'm not sure which way you're asking. Are you asking why it's okay to do cruel things, or not okay to do cruel and unusual things?
If the first: 'Cruel' does not mean 'unjust'. Cruel just means 'inflicting pain or suffering to others'. Strictly speak, *all* punishment is cruel. That is the entire premise of punishment, a deliberate attempt to cause pain or suffering. ('Punishment', of course, is just one of the purposes of the legal system, but the others are not important here. I'm talking about punishment specifically.)
However, the counts generally exclude trivial amounts of short-term suffering from 'cruel'. Trivial amounts of work, trivial amounts of embarrassment, etc. All sorts of innovative punishments are allowed if they basically are 'sentenced to do stuff that people regularly do for money', like holding a sign up or community service or whatever. If it's *less cruel* than imprisonment, than it's generally not thought of as 'cruel'.
As for why we don't allow *unusual cruelties', it's because the cruelties that are well know have *very specific restrictions*, and we know exactly how they work and exactly what limits are permissible.
And, with so few to choose from, we can easily make some sort of sliding scale of punishment. Mostly the cruelty is 'imprisonment' and we just adjust the time.
If we started allowing criminals to be sentenced to *random* cruelties, no one knows what sort of nonsense we might get. Well, actually, yes, the founder fathers *did* know exactly what sort of nonsense you could get, hence the rule.
"
While I agree that punishment not explicitly provided by statue would be unusual, I'm not actually certain that's what the phrase is intended to stop. Most of the time, punishments *are* provided by law.
I think 'unusual' is basically there to restrict 'cruel'. I.e., locking someone up for years is, in fact, fairly cruel...but it's a perfectly usual punishment, so is allowed.
Meanwhile, making someone stand on the side of the road holding a sign explaining their crimes is *unusual*, but it is not, in any meaningful way, 'cruel'. So it's allowed.
But something like denying access to a bathroom or medical care, is both cruel, as in, physically painful and humiliating, and unusual, in that it's not something that is prescribed under any law at all.
And an interesting fact is that the courts are perfectly willing to keep reconsidering what is 'usual'. Just because one place allows something by statue doesn't make it 'usual'.
On “The Atlantic just published the most important story of the year.”
As someone who lives in the South (North Georgia), I am forced to admit that, while the South has actually made up a lot of ground in removing prejudice, a lot of that was due to *Federal law*. Claiming to be better than other places because we're been on probation is not a very useful claim to make.(1)
A lot of hearts and minds have been changed over the years here, but you know whose didn't change?
The old white people who actually run the place. The people born in the 60s, and who came of political age in the 80s under Reaganism. What I guess would be called 'stage two racism', when pushback against the laws against racism started in earnest.
And their entire life has been seething anger at the government telling them racism is not acceptable. The people who still run around bashing hippies.
And now that the courts don't care, they can spring into action.
The joke is that most of the kids affected by this would honestly be baffled if someone explained this was what was going on. *They're* not the racists. Hell, their *parents* aren't the racists, not most of them them. It's the *grandparents*. (And the people running for elected office that pander to them.)
1) Although what is useful to point out is that it is not just the South, and has *never* been just the South. In a weird, twisted way, I think the Robert's Count was sorta right with that. Although non-stupid outcome would have been something like 'Legislatures cannot use civil right violations from older than twenty years the next time they put burdens on states.', which would have the added features of getting states that have cleaned up their act out from under it (Without having to go through a process) and perhaps making people understand that it happens other places, too, and *they* need to be covered.
On “Misconceptions”
One thing I feel I should point out, late as I am to the party:
While some forms of birth control (Although, interestingly, *not* the forms of birth control that people think.) can cause an egg to avoid implantation...
...everyone who considers it has failed to notice that something like 50% of fertilized eggs either fail to implant by themselves, or implant but fail to trigger 'pregnancy hormones', and get discard the next cycle.
So if a IUD has 95% chance of stopping ovulation, and a 10% *added* chance of causing the egg not to implant...uh, it just *reduced* the total amount of fertilized eggs that 'died'. Hell, it would reduce the chances *even if it reduced implantation by 100%.
Because without the IUD, let's say there were 100 fertilized eggs, and 50% 'died'. With it, there were 5 fertilized egg, and 60% or 100% or whatever died.
All contraceptives reduce the amount fertilized eggs massively. They reduce it so much that you *mathematically* have a net loss in 'number of discarded fertilized eggs', no matter *what* happens to the few that slip through.
On “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part IV: Government’s Showing, Disposition”
To explain a little farther:
The idea that 'pregnancy hormones causing lack of implantation or the fertlized egg to slough off' is idiotic. Women are *supposed* to have those hormones while pregnancy, and in fact they *stop* menstruation. A women on birth control is, *hormonally*, pregnant.(1) That is why it is prescribed for acne and whatnot.
Hell, they sometimes prescribe these 'birth control' hormones during in-vitro fertilization to make sure everything is ready for implantation. They have literally the opposite effect of ending pregnancies.
It just works as birth control because of the very happy side effect that women who are 'pregnant' do not ovulate, and thus can't *become* pregnant. (Which is why female hormonal birth control was so easy to invent...it's a natural state, there's a switch in women's bodies to turn off ovulation during pregnancy. And why male hormonal birth control is so hard to invent.)
1) Erm, at the base state of pregnancy. Actual pregnancy tends tn introduce a lot of other hormones also
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@burt-likko
I could find that as a matter of moral caution, they could have believed that these drugs are sometimes abortifacients because there appears to be some degree of scientific support that the drug can cause a fertilized egg to slough off of the uterine wall.
There actually is not any scientific support for that, nor does there appear to be any way such a thing could plausible happen. That entire assertions appeared in a *false* claim originally put forward by contraceptive companies in the 70s, that had literally no support, medically, and was quickly recanted. It was taken up by crazy anti-contraceptice lunatics who wanted to make contraceptives appear worse.
Hormonal contraceptives stop ovulation. They do this by mimicking pregnancy. They do not do a single thing to a fertilized egg, because *pregnancy itself* doesn't do anything to stop egg fertilization. We know this because it is entirely possible for women to *get pregnant* even after they have a fertilized egg. (That's what fraternal twins are, after all.)
The *only* reason that already-pregnant women do not end up with added extra embryos halfway through the pregnancy is the lack of them releasing eggs. Pregnancy, or fake pregnancy hormones, do not, in any way, shape, or form, stop implantation. Period. End of story. This is all insane fairy-tale land nonsense.(1)
Even *Plan B* works this way. Plan B is an emergency level of hormones to *immediately* stop ovulation, and it works because the fact is that fertilization works somewhat backwards than people think...sperm doesn't met egg halfway down, sperm goes in and sits there for a bit, and egg runs into it.
1) In fact, hormone birth control, considering it can stop or reduce menstruation (Like tri-cyclen and others), can actually makes it less likely an implanted egg will be 'flushed out'.
On “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part III: Justiciability of Individual Claims [Updated]”
An interesting fact is that it is the Green's position as Hobby Lobby's directors that is actually requiring the action on their part.
Not their position as the stockholders/owners (Stockholders do not run a company), not their position as officers (As the directors could just hire some other officers to do that job.) It's their positions as directors, aka, members of the corporate board, the people ultimately running the corporation.
Directors are not paid. The Greens are paid, via corporate dividends, as stockholders. And they are paid, via normal paycheck, as CEO and CFO and whatever.
But they are not paid as directors.
It is a volunteer position that accrues no benefit, and they technically would suffer no damages if they did not continue to hold that position.(1) There's no reason they can't step aside as directors and let someone else come in and hire people to manage their insurance.
1) This might put their jobs as officers in jeopardy, but strictly speaking, as directors, they were supposed to hire 'the best people', not 'themselves'. They can't argue that some different board members might hire someone else, causing damages to themselves, without also arguing that they didn't do their fiduciary duty as directors to hire the best person for the job.
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@michael-drew
Their claim, whatever you think of it, is that they’re *participating* in the murder if they pay in contraceptives, but not if they pay in money. After all, they have to pay employees with something – paying with money is the least murder-promoting way to pay other than, I guess, paying in anti-abortifacient-contraceptives literature, which really doesn’t get the whole “paying” (with a thing of value) function accomplished.
This is probably their claim, but it is exceptionally silly.
Because they aren't paying in contraceptives. They're paying in insurance.
Has anyone noticed that, strictly speaking, it is more work to use insurance to buy contraceptives than buying them with cash? You can literally just *hand over* cash and get contraceptives, using insurance is a whole process. Having employees use insurance makes it a longer and more indirect process than having employees use cash.
Admittedly, it makes it *more expensive* for the employees, yes. But Hobby Lobby is not, and can not, argue that it has a 'right' to make employee compensation not got as far.
And now here's a weird hypothetical: Let's say that the government, for whatever reason, decided that corporations over 50 employees must pay those employees using direct deposit if the employee wants so.
And let's also postulate, in this universe, that abortion providers do not accept cash.
Does Hobby Lobby have an exemption to that law, under the logic that somehow paying people by directly putting money in their bank account makes it easier to get an abortion?
"
Oh, and that said: I don't disagree with the idea of them having standing, per se. But that's because I extremely dislike the idea of 'standing' stopping people from suing, and dismissing over 'standing' should be limited to things where people clearly have no interest in a case. And moreover, I'm of the opinion that the Supreme Court basically should be exempt from the rules of 'standing' on top of that.
And hence I'm not really the best judge as to whether they should have standing under the law. I am in favor of as lax an idea of 'standing' as possible.
I think the case should be dismissed, however. Not because of standing, but because 'a corporation deciding to not provide a employment benefit as required under the law' cannot possible be 'religious exercise' under the RFRA, because corporations cannot exercise religion.
And the Greens, while they can exercise religion, are not actually required to do anything. Well, except they do have a the fiduciary duty as directors of the corporation that they have voluntary taken on. If that duty interferes with their religious beliefs, they should probably, uh, stop volunteering to do that.
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I am not comfortable at all with the notion that a local government can target a religious group – say by requiring businesses in its downtown area to be open on certain days of the week – and avoid anyone having standing to challenge it simply by pointing out that the business has a corporate form. Allowing the government to do that would be to allow it to de facto restrict the availability of the corporate form to favored religious groups.
What do you mean ' the availability of the corporate form'?
The Greens are stockholders. If Hobby Lobby is doing something the Green do not like, they have the right to sue Hobby Lobby, or sell their stock.
The Greens are directors. Directors functionally have no 'rights' at all, except to vote and whatnot. They have duties to comply with the law.
The Greens are officers. Officers also have duties to comply with the law, and also are employees so can sue Hobby Lobby under employment laws.
People have no right to own, or be employed, in a corporation with specific 'values'. Even if it is a corporation they are trying to create themselves.
That is a distinct entity they're creating. It is required to exist in certain very conscribed boundaries.
For example, it must have a CEO. It must hold an annual meeting of the shareholders. It must keep specific records. The name probably has to include 'inc', or 'co' or 'ltd' and can't be longer than 80 characters. It must submit certain activities to shareholder vote. It must recognize union votes. It must provide health insurance as defined by the ACA if over a certain size.
On “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part II: Justiciability of Corporate Claims”
Oh, and I find myself completely baffled by your attempt to make that point. While non-profits don't have stockholders, they do have owners. Their members own them.
Its just that, unlike for-profits, their owners cannot transfer money out of the non-profit to themselves. That is, in fact, the difference between an 'stockholder' and a 'member'. Stockholders are entitled to a portion of the corporate profits, members are not. (The 'profits' of a non-profit, if the non-profit feels like distributing them, can only be distributed to other non-profits.)
(Which is why Cato's strange idea of calling members 'stockholders' is not just being ignored by the IRS, considering Cato profits *are* accruing to their owners. It's not just some fancy mis-naming. Their membership are serving the entire purpose of stock. It's like the people who set up Cato literally did not understand the concept of a non-profit, and thought that 501(c)(3) was just a place you could put normal corporations so they didn't pay taxes.)
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Additionally, the claim “non-profit corporations … lack shareholders” is erroneous; while non-profit corporations TYPICALLY do not have shareholders, excepts like the Cato Institute exist.
Non-profits do not have shareholders by definition. They have members.
The Cato Institute is not an 'exception' to the law, it is simply abusing the word 'stock', or abusing the non-profit statues.
The Cato Institute has, confusingly, decided to call it's memberships 'stock', and make memberships behave like stock, including having one vote per 'membership' and allowing people to hold multiple memberships (Which is indeed legal) and making these memberships transferable via reselling and inheritance. (Which is, uh, not legal, as far as anyone can tell, although that's a weird gray issue. Memberships in non-profits are not supposed to be considered property.) and apparently have distributed payments directly to the members proportional to the amount of memberships they own. (Which is flat out, 100%, completely utterly illegal. That is literally a violation of the concept of 'non-profit'.)
That does not actually mean it does have stock.
Or, alternately, it isn't a non-profit at all, which appears to be the view that the IRS has started taking.
So, no, non-profits do not have stock. Period.
On “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part III: Justiciability of Individual Claims [Updated]”
The fundamental problem with the Greens’ claims today is that they are not the ones who are asked by the Contraception Mandate to dispense the disputed drugs. Only Hobby Lobby and Mardel are asked to do this. The Greens are not obliged to do anything – and they are not Hobby Lobby. Corporations, even closely-held corporations such as Hobby Lobby, have long been held to have identities separate from individuals who own and control them, and their owners may be effectively compelled to act in the capacity of an agent of the corporation sometimes directly contrary to their wishes and desires as individuals.
This is exactly the point I keep making.
Although ' their owners may be effectively compelled' is confusing. That is true in this specific instance, but what can actually be compelled is the officers. It's just that's the same people here.
When faced with a choice between compliance with the law and the inevitability of drawing a crippling liability upon her ward, a fiduciary must set aside her own preferences and desires, and acts in the best interests of her ward. The minimum that a fiduciary can do in this case is to get out of the way of the corporation’s compliance with the law. A fiduciary who cannot do this for whatever reason, including a personal religious objection, is not relieved of her duty to act in the best interests of her ward.
Indeed. Hobby Lobby is required, by law, do something.
This means that their agents have a duty to that thing. And by their 'agents', we mean their officers, or someone that the officers have hired. If their agents do not wish to do that thing, it is the duty of the directors to remove and replace those agents.
It does not actually matter that the officers and the directors are the same people, and who the stockholders are is not relevant at all. (Stockholders do not have any say in the running of a corporation beyond selecting directors.)
If the officers of Hobby Lobby are uncomfortable with dealing with an insurance plan that provides contraceptive insurance, I suggest they ask their directors (aka, themselves) to hire another officer to do that, or that they themselves hire an employee to do that.
On “Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Part II: Justiciability of Corporate Claims”
@jonathan-mcleod
However, the declaration that is regularly made that corporations are not people seems blatantly false. I know that legally, this is true, but in reality, corporations are people. We can define it different ways, but corporations are the owners, managers, employees, etc. They’re the people that comprise the corporation. Hobby Lobby wouldn’t exist without the Greens or its other agents.
This is, in any sense of the word 'exist', incorrect.
The most obvious way to demonstrate this is to point out that if the Green sold all their shares of Hobby Lobby, and fired all employees, the corporation would still exist. Obviously, corporations need people to do things in the name of the corporation, but they don't need any specific people.
And they still exist even without any people at all. If a corporation somehow ends up existing without anyone authorized to represent themselves as the corporation, than the government itself will take over operation.
A corporation is not the people that make it up. A corporation is a legal fiction residing in the mind of the government, which has specific people entitled to attribute their own acts to that fiction. Those people can change. Those people can even not exist. The corporation will continue to exist until dissolved.
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@jm3z-aitch
Keep in mind what we’re actually asking of the Greens, from their perspective, which is to participate in the murder of humans. I think they’re wrong about that, and I’ll fight for policies that preserve the right to choice, but it’s not my or our place to force them to participate in what they define as atrocities and sins before God. In fact it’s rather an appalling thought that we would so substitute our judgement for them that we would compel them to participate in what they sincerely define as an atrocity and a grave sin.
If the Greens don't want to participate, then the Greens should get Hobby Lobby (Which, after all, they control) to hire someone else to operate their insurance program.
There is way too much conflating on 'them' and 'their behavior', which somehow means both 'the Greens' and 'Hobby Lobby'. Those are not the same entity.
If a corporation has someone that is morally opposed to complying with directives from the US government, the corporation can either fire that person, or just hire someone else to do that. There is absolutely no reason that could not happen here.
People need to stop pretending that 'Hobby Lobby' is somehow living inside the heads of the Greens.
On “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Internet Company.”
You might have at most two choices, a cable company like Comcast or a DSL line from the phone company.
Man, I would kill for two choices.
The phone company and the cable company in my town are the same company.
On “To No One’s Surprise”
@j-r
In my humble opinion, spending money on politics is about the daftest thing that you can do, from an investment perspective. The Kochs and Adelstein and whoever else would get a much better return on their money if they drastically cut their campaign contributions and instead focused on lobbying. The fact that they do not is pretty good evidence that most of this is about sincere ideological beliefs and/or a vanity project.
I find myself somewhat agreeing with you. The reason have all this money in elections all the sudden is partially because people who want to do insane things in government are trying to force their people in.
This has...barely succeeded, and caused a hell of a lot of blowback, and has, at this point, crippled the political party they're using for that. Sure, if they keep pouring money into it, it will *keep* barely succeeding, but there is an immunity that builds up, especially since the other side has started calling out specific entities by name. (Which is one of the reasons I think it is very important to get rid of *dark* money.)
The problem with money in politics, in normal politics not the crazy stuff, is the lobbying, where large corporations stand there day and night telling politicians certain things, and there is no counter.
If we want to fix things, *that* is probably where we need to look first: The sheer volume of misinformation and nonsense that goes directly from corporations and industries into the ears of already-elected politicians.
So, I always ask those who don’t like these types of rulings the same question: where is the evidence, empirical or otherwise, that more money flowing into elections is actually a corrupting factor?
I think there's very little evidence that the money now allowed in *this* decision corrupted anything. Maximum total donations were never very justifiable.
However, I do think campaign money causes corruption, and in an ideal world candidate's access to money would be, in some way, *directly* proportional to how supported they are, which is something that donation limits are *trying* to mimic, but doing it very poorly. Instead of having people donate $5-$5000, we could instead have them sign a petition, and for each new signature they get $100. Or we put a cap on each donation of $1, and have a $99 dollar matching donation from the government.
That has obvious problems, but it would much more be in tune with the idea in this country that everyone should have an equal voice in politics.
Of course, with these complete end-runs around the campaigns, my ideas can't possibly work. What we need to do there is remove dark money and see what *next* needs fixing.
On “Subsidized Birth Control and Matt Walsh’s Dubious Theory of Rights”
@zic
Nobody debates the ‘provided without cost to the patient,’ and I’d live with small copays, for instance. As long as they were reasonable and potentially included exceptions were made when it created economic hardship.
Can I argue against requiring copays? ;)
Birth control is exactly the opposite of where we want copays. Copays are intended to slightly discourage medical services, so they are not abused.
Prescribed birth control cannot be 'abused', and it is not something we want to discourage by any amount. In fact, we want to encourage it. The more birth control out there the better.
Unplanned pregnancies are a *hideous* drain on the resources of this country, and ruin the lives of women and even men. Just from sheer *cost* reasons, stopping unplanned pregnancies is probably a better investment than *roads*.
...unless we want to go with the idea that sex by women is immortal and we want a 'sin tax' on it. Which is really the only reason we'd want to have women pay for birth control.
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@zic
I was actually trying to avoid the rape discussion; I felt my persuasion ought to be rooted in the world where women are reliably allowed agency and consent, at least when it comes to sex, if not pregnancy.
Fair enough.
It is true that a lot of rape results in pregnancy; as I recall, it happens at exactly the same rate as other unprotected sex.
I know what you are saying, shooting down that completely ludicrous nonsense that various Republicans have started yammering about how women's bodies can magically 'shut down' during rape. (Ignoring the fact that 'rape' is essentially how all species procreate, humans included until very recently, so reproduction protection *against* rape would have been evolutionary suicide. Then again, those people probably don't believe in evolution.)
But you've given too much ground. ;)
[Unprotected] rape can result in a *much* higher chance of pregnancies than consensual unprotected sex, depending on what you mean by 'unprotected sex'.
While calendar-based 'birth control' is not the greatest thing in the world, and is not 'protected sex', it *does* cut pregnancies by about two thirds if followed normally, and by more than 90% if followed perfectly. Presumably, rapists do not follow it.
And, on top of that, during consensual sex, there is higher chance of people not being in the correct position during ejaculation, if you understand what I'm saying. Whereas rapists tend to be rather unoriginal.
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@jm3z-aitch
As I note below, we don’t allow employers to simply increase pay sufficiently to cover it, or to let a female employee use it for some other purpose if they prefer.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, that could run to hundreds of dollars a month for some women, and more to the point, I find it completely astonishing that you think the solution to 'companies don't want to pay for insurance that includes birth control' is 'women should turn in their birth control receipts to the company and get directly reimbursed'.
Have you not noticed that there is currently a lawsuit out there about churches *signing a statement to indicate they weren't paying for contraceptives*, on the lunatic grounds that such a thing was a violation of their freedom? How do you think this 'Companies can just pay for contraceptives' thing is supposed to work?
Or are you one of the insanely large number of men who think *all* women can buy the $20 a month stuff at Target?
@zic
And for the population most at risk of unplanned pregnancies, the decisions really will be “do I buy food” or “do I buy contraception.” The number one reason for second-trimester abortions, remember, is a woman not having the funds to get one earlier.
And let's remember the devastating consequences of lack of birth control, which are not really comparable to *any* other lack of medical service: There's no other medical service that, if you neglect it for a week, you suddenly have two decades of very large costs.
Since contraception is only a small part of the mandated preventative services, it’s only a concern because it’s deemed somehow immoral.
To everyone that thinks 'immorality' is relevant here (Not that it's immoral, but whatever.), I offer the fact that one out of four women will be raped in their lives, usually while they're of childbearing age.
In fact, interesting mathematical fact, a women who uses birth control correctly and has sex every day is less likely to become pregnant than a women who does not use birth control but does not ever choose to have sex. (Because of the aforementioned rape likelihood.)
But remember, everyone, we live in a universe where all sex is consensual and all birth control is less than a dollar a day and avoiding pregnancy has never really been that important in the lives of women.
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@patrick
Hobby Lobby doesn’t have standing to bring the RFRA claim, and neither do the Greens, if you’re asking me (which nobody is.)
But then, I have a very nuanced view of corporate personhood.
I mostly agree with you. The Greens have no standing. But Hobby Lobby does have standing.
And, as I've explained every time this is talked about, Mr. Hobby Lobby should take the stand and testify as to his specific religious beliefs, so we can determine that they are *his* beliefs, and not the beliefs of his owners or his employers. That's what we always do in cases like this. We don't let lawyers and whatnot speak for people, we make them get up and tell us what they sincerely believe.
Oh, Hobby Lobby is not a corporeal or even sentient entity? He's a legal fiction? Then how the *hell* is he claiming to have religious beliefs?
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@dave
It absolutely comes into play. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to the extent a sincere religious objection is raised to an otherwise neutral and generally applicable, the government must 1) demonstrate a compelling government interest and 2) show that the burden is the least restrictive alternative available. RFRA basically restored the strict scrutiny test that got severely undermined in the Employment Division v Smith decision.
You're begging the question.
'Not paying for something' is not an 'exercise of religion'.
And you can't burden someone's exercise of 'not paying for something' by making them pay for it.
I'm pretty certain the courts have already *specifically* addressed that concept, with people trying to avoid paying taxes to keep from supporting things against their religion.
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@jm3z-aitch
But Hobby Lobby wants to purchase some insurance for their employees, and you completely disregard that. Instead, you say “if you want to buy them some insurance, ou must buy them a complete package, as we define it.”
Didn't you *just* finish saying:
One is to suggest that you’re implicitly assuming that if the insurer pays for your contraception that won’t affect your pay. At the extreme, you could be ensured contraception, but you still might be having to choose between using that $30 for food or for rent.
If Hobby Lobby buying contraceptive insurance *lowers* an employee's pay, then Hobby Lobby *not* buying health insurance at all raises their pay, by definition.
So, no, Hobby Lobby buying insurance that doesn't actually cover a specific medical condition is *not* better than it not providing insurance. Better to just give the employees the money directly, especially since the subsidies only kick in if the employer *doesn't* provide insurance.
Perhaps a better solution would be to let their employees buy a supercheap government insurance supplement that covers contraceptives?
Which lets everyone who doesn't have the specific medical condition of being 'a fertile female' not buy it, and lets the people who have cheap birth control just buy that directly. So the people who actually *buy* that supplement are only the people who have expensive birth control. Making that 'insurance'...not actually be a shared pool, and rather expensive.
Of course, by 'supercheap government insurance', perhaps you're imagining the government subsidizing it. Or, in other words, you're imagining the government essentially paying for contraceptives for people.
Yeah, that's a real workable solution you've come up with there. I'm sure there will be no objections to that.
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A lot of people here seem to be assuming that women's contraceptive is some cheap thing they pick up off-brand at the Pharmacy. And it is...95% of the time. The reason it needs to be covered under insurance is the other 5% of the time, where something odd is needed. People who buy $10 a month pills are *not* the people who need contraceptives in their health insurance. Contraceptive is a medical issue, and hence can be *really expensive*.
Exactly like *all* medical insurance, in fact.
So let me ask people agreeing it's a human right, and saying that women should just buy it, are you actually suggesting that women get paid a few hundred dollars more each month so that, if they need that sort of contraceptive, they can buy it? (Or maybe companies could take a few dollars from everyone's paycheck to cover that, and put that in a pool to cover the more expensive ones. Or, instead of the company having to do that, they could get some third party to do that...oh, wait.)
Or are you people suggesting that only 95% of women need contraceptives?
Or maybe you think they should just buy *their own* insurance to cover contraceptives. But there's a reason we don't sell *individual medical items* insurance...people who need them would buy the insurance, people who don't wouldn't. You can't buy 'heart insurance', you can't buy 'knee insurance', and you can't buy 'contraceptive insurance'. Because only people who have heart problems, knee problems, or expensive contraceptives would buy it!
Luckily, we've already solved this problem. We're now requiring *everyone* to buy insurance policies that cover basically all medical problems. Hey, look at that.
The actual problem here is half the people here seem to think buying contraceptives is like buying food or something, that there is some fixed, low amount that women can pay to get contraceptives. (For some reason, they think this despite it being unlike how *any* other aspect of medicine works.)
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