Dang! You & your long posts!
I'll answer in successive edits.
I'm comfortable with their being regulations to accepting public money. I disagree that this is "forcing citizens to surveil each other." I think it's "requiring landlords to ensure money they get is being used legitimately." Business owners have extra obligations. Just as a landlord is responsible for the housing being up to code and following the Fair Housing Act.
Meeting codes should be about health & safety. And I'm fine with regulation which standardizes
the complex contractual relationship between landlords & the typically unsophisticated
consumer (residential tenants...as opposed to the more worldly commercial tenants).
But I draw the line a requiring that I surveil tenants. In my experience, the word "surveil"
is accurate, since proactive monitoring & reporting to be burdensome & smacks of getting
citizens to snitch on each other. While you use the benign underlined language to describe
this, it still strikes me as a nascent big brother culture.
I would disagree with the Clinton presidency's argument, how did the law settle out? Because people argue lots of things, but to my knowledge you have to have a warrant to search public housing if you're a law enforcement official.
The USSC wisely decided that Clinton's attempt to gut basic civil liberties as a condition of
receiving a government benefit was unconstitutional. I find this particularly dangerous,
because as government provides us with ever more services, & these services come with
conditions, then the ability to withdraw such benefits is power over us.
(Clinton was a fascist's dream. This was one of many attempts at subverting civil liberties.
Perhaps his worst excess was the Petty Offense Doctrine, wherein gov can now unilaterally
waive your right to a jury trial in some cases.)
(And I disagree with your rejection.)
What fun would it be if we always agreed?
If providing health insurance is against their faith - and there are some religions that refuse it as it is gambling or some such - then that's one thing. Unless they're a healthcare provider they're not providing the healthcare services, so they're not doing anything "against their faith." They're providing the benefit of insurance for their employees - which the employees must still pay a portion of.
If one pays for a service for another, I see how this can be viewed as providing the service. In this
perspective, the USSC apparently agrees with me. But the larger issue is forcing an employer to
provide any such service....that's what I oppose most of all. This is where the USSC & I disagree.
As I stated, how we have the arrangement in the US is screwed up. But blame the existing insurance companies for the maintenance of the status quo rather than those in the government who wanted single payer. Cause hey, our plan of spending more than everyone else for lower quality care is the best plan, right?
I blame more than insurance companies. After all their behavior is largely a function of the
legal & economic environment they face. But the solution to improved health care is beyond
the scope of this thread...I'm just addressing government's impositions upon employers.
If the government said everyone gets X amount of their salary donated to charity, you would be denying their right to religion if you refused to donate to the charity of their choice. If you decided YOU got to pick what charity they'd donate to and that would be the FSM memorial fund or some such, that would absolutely infringe.
This analogy doesn't fit well because the employee owns one's salary, & should
direct what is done with it. But your analogy does illustrate why the employee
shouldn't be directing what the employer pays for.
Unless I said you thought that way, I wasn't. I didn't say that. You always presume everything in a post responding to you is about you, it isn't.
Note that I was doing the opposite of presuming....I asked.
I didn't believe you were speaking of me, btw. It was a jest.
Isn't it weird how it's really only birth control that made a splash and how the SCOTUS decision was like "it's cool to object to birth control but we're not going to let you push this decision to say it's cool to object to blood transfusions."
I'd say it's cuz opposition to birth control is much wider than to blood transfusions.
The USSC is never just about constitutional law....they also look at power of various factions,
their own values, & their own beliefs. Catholicism ranks higher the JWs. And the justices
would pay little heed to fringe Xians who reject medical treatment altogether.
As I noted, their argument is that IUDs and Plan B cause spontaneous abortions by preventing implantation of the egg. First, Plan B probably doesn't prevent implantation, just as hormonal birth control (of which Plan B is a high dose) was thought to prevent implantation but doesn't, Plan B most likely has little to no affect on implantation. It's hard to say for sure because we can't just shove cameras up there 24/7 and check.Their argument is flawed because 50% of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion (AKA Miscarriage.) Most before they're ever noticed - some before implantation. So IUDs in particular actually PREVENT fertilization which reduces the number of possible pregnancies which reduces the number of miscarriages. Same with Plan B. (And yes, copper only IUDs prevent fertilization too.) So lets say you have 10 potential pregnancies and the IUD causes one spontaneous abortion but prevents 9 pregnancies, on average 5 of those potential pregnanices would have resulted in spontaneous abortion without birth control. So there are actually fewer miscarriages WITH an IUD than WITHOUT.
But this isn't about facts, and it isn't even about faith, it's about what they believe the facts are. You are entitled to your own religion - I would argue a corporation is NOT but individuals ARE- but you aren't entitled to your own facts. Prohibiting Plan B and IUDs increases the number of dead "people" compared to easy access to birth control.
I don't defend the medical side of their argument. I don't challenge your facts.
But I have a different view of the Constitution (originalist), & different goals for
the relationships (more voluntary) between government, citizens & companies.
