Sometimes, as LBJ used to say, it starts to rain and you can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it, and you can’t make it stop. I’m starting to feel that way about the Supreme Court.

The high-stakes fight over implementing parts of the troubled health care reform law will move to the Supreme Court in coming months, in a dispute involving coverage for contraceptives and “religious liberty.” The justices agreed on Tuesday to review provisions in the Affordable Care Act requiring employers of a certain size to offer insurance coverage for birth control and other reproductive health services without a co-pay. At issue is whether private companies and non-profits can refuse on the claim it violates their religious beliefs.
I say this as a lifelong Papist, this is what happens when you get too many ultramontane, Pius XII Catholics on the high court. The Church has been slug-nutty on birth control for 50 years, and the anti-choice people hate the form of birth control in question because it deprives them of clinic doors to which they can glue their heads. The principle at stake here is a joke; not even by the preposterous standards of this court as regarding corporate personhood, a corporation cannot reasonably be said to have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The people who run it certainly do, but they cannot reasonably argue that their freedom of religion is being curtailed because their employees can get their ladyparts medicine covered under the Affordable Care Act, unless your argument is that an employer has a right to subject employees to the employer’s religious beliefs, which is an obvious contradiction, unless you’re prepared to decide that an employer’s First Amendment rights trump those of his employees. Wait. Forget I said that. This action should have been laughed out of the system two courts ago. Now, once again, common sense hangs on the weathervane that is Anthony Kennedy’s intellect…

By Charles P. Pierce

Sometimes, as LBJ used to say, it starts to rain and you can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it, and you can’t make it stop. I’m starting to feel that way about the Supreme Court.

The high-stakes fight over implementing parts of the troubled health care reform law will move to the Supreme Court in coming months, in a dispute involving coverage for contraceptives and “religious liberty.” The justices agreed on Tuesday to review provisions in the Affordable Care Act requiring employers of a certain size to offer insurance coverage for birth control and other reproductive health services without a co-pay. At issue is whether private companies and non-profits can refuse on the claim it violates their religious beliefs.
I say this as a lifelong Papist, this is what happens when you get too many ultramontane, Pius XII Catholics on the high court. The Church has been slug-nutty on birth control for 50 years, and the anti-choice people hate the form of birth control in question because it deprives them of clinic doors to which they can glue their heads. The principle at stake here is a joke; not even by the preposterous standards of this court as regarding corporate personhood, a corporation cannot reasonably be said to have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The people who run it certainly do, but they cannot reasonably argue that their freedom of religion is being curtailed because their employees can get their ladyparts medicine covered under the Affordable Care Act, unless your argument is that an employer has a right to subject employees to the employer’s religious beliefs, which is an obvious contradiction, unless you’re prepared to decide that an employer’s First Amendment rights trump those of his employees. Wait. Forget I said that. This action should have been laughed out of the system two courts ago. Now, once again, common sense hangs on the weathervane that is Anthony Kennedy’s intellect.

The obvious retort to this absurd cause of action is to ask whether or not the court would listen to a similar objection on behalf of a company owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses that didn’t want to cover blood transfusions for its employees. (Let us not even begin to get into Christian Science at this point.) However, members of this court, most notably Antonin (Short Time) Scalia, were notably unimpressed in 1990 when some Native Americans tried to argue that peyote was a vital to their religious rituals, pointing out that peyote had been an element in their liturgies for longer than bread had been a part of the Catholic Mass, and that, therefore, their use of it should not disqualify them from receiving benefits under Oregon law. There are people on this court who are more than willing to decide a case based on what is a real religion and what is not, and let’s just say that none of them are Zoroastrians. In his majority opinion, ol’ Short Time argued:

It is no more necessary to regard the collection of a general tax, for example, as “prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” by those citizens who believe support of organized government to be sinful than it is to regard the same tax as “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” of those publishing companies that must pay the tax as a condition of staying in business. It is a permissible reading of the text, in the one case as in the other, to say that, if prohibiting the exercise of religion (or burdening the activity of printing) is not the object of the tax, but merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended.
(An added double irony: this exercise in absurdity was made possible by the passage in 1993 of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was proposed in the Senate by Democratic senator Chuck Schumer and signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, as a direct result of the Court’s holding in the peyote case.)

Of course, the plaintiffs in that case were not corporations, but actual people, and that may make all the difference.