SCOTUS and birth control

Maaan, seriously this is pissing me off! It's bad enough that that whole hobby lobby debacle got through, now religious institutions are bitching about the form they have to sign so that an employee can get contraceptives from the government instead of their employer provided insurance which was the whole basis of the reason SCOTUS sided with Hobby Lobby

Yup, I don't think I ever want to shop at Hobby Lobby ever again. How dare an employer get in the way of someone else's need for contraceptives! Personally I don't even eat anything from "Chick-fil a" because of their religious undertones. Phuck... "It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, world."

Religion in general is the biggest cause of this problem because they figured out centuries ago that the most effective way to propagate a religion is for it's followers to have as many babies as possible since most children automatically follow their parents religion. That's one reason LDS spread so fast even though they are very new, because of their original policy of multiple wives and many children. Because of this long standing ideal to " Be fruitful and multiply" there is a strong resistance to the concept of birth control, particularly by the religious right wing conservatives that run everything. Birth control should be free and available to any woman or girl of any age and proper use should be taught from elementary age on. Also they need to market birth control for men which they already have in prototype form but haven't pushed onto the market because they (pharmaceutical companies) don't think it would be profitable because of stupid masculine ideals that men usually have.

I personally believe everyone should be on birth control until they are 18 and have to take parenting classes and pass a test to be allowed to have children. You have to pass a test to drive a car, but any asshole can pop out kids and abuse/neglect them which is why we have so many problems now.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone should be on birth control. It's serious medication with serious side effects. At the same time, I'ms just livid at how the constitutional interpretation of SCOTUS. Companies can have religious rights? What? And also Alito's little dissertation about how employees can receive contraception aid from the government if the company signs a form for the health provider is all good and all, but now you have the problem where that religious college is refusing to even sign that. They've now opened themselves for a slippery slope, not just with contraceptives and other medical routines but also with anything else any religion has issues against. It's just soooo ridiculous

The problem is that we're making screwed up decisions based on other, more screwed up decisions. This wouldn't be a factor at all had Obamacare not been passed. A law that many pages, spanning that many subjects, that no one has read is simply bad law. It doesn't matter what the intentions are. The President himself doesn't know what's in the law, except that it's going to piss people off. He keeps delaying certain actions in the law, even though that act in and of itself isn't within the power of the Executive Branch, to curry political favor with various businesses or because the government simply isn't ready/doesn't have the necessary infrastructure to support those functions yet. On this specific case, a boss not paying for something you want doesn't prevent you from being able to buy that thing on your own. Your boss not paying for your birth control doesn't prevent you from getting it yourself. Just as my boss not paying for my anime collection doesn't prohibit me from paying for DVDs and BDs. Then you also have to consider the nature of employment. From the employer's perspective, they are not hiring you to give you benefits. They are hiring you to perform certain tasks. Salary, hourly rates, benefits, those are all rewards/compensation for actions you're performing on the company's behalf. Companies typically set their own rules. As far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong about this, there are no companies in existence that hire people primarily to provide benefits to them- though Ben and Jerry's got close to that with their corporate structure. They failed dismally, but I will give them props for trying. In the case of a publicly traded company, where there are stock holders, I'd have more of a problem with trying to ban one kind of... thing... or another. If your company has hundreds or thousands of stockholders, it's hard to be able to cater to the values of each and every single person exactly. But I'm pretty sure Hobby Lobby's not a public company. I think all of 5 people or so own it. I think they all have the same last name, too. I don't really have a dog in this fight, outside of not liking the government telling people what they can and can't do unnecessarily. I am pretty damn sore over Obamacare though. The ACA was basically a one-sided, one-size-fits-none, knee-jerk reaction by Democrats to try fixing/making worse a problem they caused in the 1960s. I narrowly dodged the Individual Mandate Bullet by getting a job just in the nick of time. Also, I'm now paying for mammograms, but I don't think I'm able to get them. (Eff you John Roberts, eff you right in your ass) Also. Xueli, do we have to use the slippery slope line? Isn't that the same line liberals won't accept from conservatives when they say that regarding same-sex marriage, drug legalization, guns, environmentalism, sex, drugs and violence on TV? Saying "slippery slope" is almost as bad as saying "The fact of the matter is".

But I'm pretty sure your anime collection doesn't actually affect your physical health. A lot of the rhetoric on birth control is also by people who have no idea about human physiology. Birth control directly affect women endocrine systems which effect everything else. To say that it's right for them to have an employer dock your pay for health insurance that doesn't even address a vital part of your overall health isn't exactly correct. If they want it to be that way, then all of healthcare should in fact, be under federal overview and then the companies won't have to worry about having to pay for women's health. I'm not terribly understanding what you mean by slippery slope being something? that liberals... something?

Health insurance is something an employer lets you opt into or opt out of. There is no force involved. Some jobs don't offer any health insurance at all. Your pay isn't being docked though. You're agreeing to pay a little bit of your salary into an option in exchange for your company paying a lot more. It's something you're consciously agreeing to, knowing full well what the consequences are. Up until ACA, you had other, viable options. In no case does your employer not providing your birth control doesn't prevent you from obtaining it yourself. If anything, your employer pays your salary, so you could go buy it yourself and say that your employer bought it for you because without your salary provided by your employer you wouldn't be able to. The issue has never been about health, though. Ever. The game behind the game has been property rights. It has been all along. Ultimately, that's what every liberal vs conservative vs libertarian vs authoritarian battle for the past 200 years has been about. Birth control is just something easy to grasp for people and something to get them excited about.When you tell people how they have to spend their money - e.g. the government forcing company owners to spend money on this or that - you're disrupting how they use their property. That should be kept to an absolute minimum. The issue is still telling your employer how to spend their money. Demanding an employer buy something for you is no different than demanding an employer to buy something for me. I don't need birth control pills. I never will. But I do need anime. It gives me good feels. And feeling good is a good step to being healthy. As I have not bought any anime since Anime Next, one could say I'm probably about due. As for the government - where does the government get its income? How is it supposed to pay for health services to 330 million people? It can barely cover medicare and medicaid. It's totally ruined the VA- you know, the thing that was supposed to be the working model of how the ACA would work? Healthcare should be a personal thing and the only people involved should be you and a doctor, not you and a doctor and an insurance person and a government bureaucrat. You want affordable healthcare? Let's lobby Washington to abolish insurance companies and keep the government out of healthcare entirely forever. That'll cut back on millions of dollars worth of paperwork.

*sigh* Honestly, the fact that you're actually comparing anime consumption with birth control is just mind boggling to me. It's just such apples and oranges that I really don't understand why it's even being mentioned. Because last I checked, your anime collection won't actually help regulate your irregular flows or endometriosis. I'm not gonna lie, that right there is just killing your ethos for me...