Calvinball is from Calvin and Hobbes, where the one who holds the ball makes up the rules and changes them constantly to keep their personal advantage going.
I’m going to go political today, sorry, and I know not all will agree with me and if you don’t, thank you for putting up with me anyway.
Okay. That Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision? Ruth Bader Ginsberg had some very relevant points to make on the dissenting side.
It looks to me like they established religion of one group of people over another. Hobby Lobby was not a household; they are a large for-profit corporation that invested their 401Ks in the companies manufacturing the very products they denied their employees and they sell goods made by cheap labor in a country with forced sterilizations and abortions, so the hypocrisy is strong in this one.
Here’s John Oliver the day before the case came down, anticipating how it was going to go. He gives credit to Hobby Lobby’s good deeds where they have rightfully earned it and then, in the stand-up comedian style he’s so good at, he tells it to them straight on the rest.
The question I have is, do job applicants now have a right to ask a prospective employer what their religion is? Because it is suddenly very relevant, while the employer sure can’t legally ask the applicant theirs.
Ginsberg brings up Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions, but they reject more than blood.
On the practical side, if you allow an employer to opt out of providing medical coverage for various cherry-picked items because of the employer’s religion, you have to deal with the outcome that will inevitably happen that someone someday will be in the hospital on TPN, IV feeding for the very ill like I went through five years ago with the infusion alone costing $2000 per day hospital care aside–and as this case stands, their employer in the name of their religion can stick their supposedly insured employee with that whole bill. Because, you know, the employee’s going to hell for messing with their veins but the employer doesn’t want to be dragged down there with them.
Even though the employee paid their premiums. Which were part of their compensation package. And even though this was not an individual denying them, it’s a corporation, ie a fictitious legal entity created specifically to put a buffer between an individual and the company they own.
Apply this scenario to any chemo infusion drug, too, and you see how widespread a problem we suddenly have here just to start.
Corporations are not real people. This has not been a controversial statement for 200 years and it shouldn’t be now.
Scalia on his more outrageous cases like this claims that the ruling applies only to this one thing right here, but that is never true at the lower court level. Precedent sets precedents and other courts honor and uphold the Supreme Court, apparently more than Scalia does.
That IV case or something very like it is going to happen. They have set themselves up to be overturned.
We can only pray we have a different membership on the Court by then, and soon.