Perhaps I’m just influenced from the Canadian perspective, and it’s likely that our contraceptives are subsidized by the state, but we go into stores and buy this type of stuff. The thing I found reprehensible from the article was
[quote=“Washington Post, post:44, topic:339”] but also that they should not even have to notify the government that they refuse to do so because, they maintain, notification would trigger the government to intervene to ensure coverage.
[/quote]
I don’t see how their interpretation pans out, as it’s one thing to deny a service, and another to deny them access to that service. I get what they’re doing, they want those people not to have abortions, but denying information to vulnerable people, and even further intentionally not telling the government that you are helping this person, because they’d be willing to provide that information if morally you wouldn’t want to.
If a christian hospital wants to provide service for free/much lower amounts, I think that imposing on these doctors something that from their religious perspective violates the hippocratic oath is unfair, and telling a charity that’s trying to help people, you have to help them in this specific way as well, will slightly dissuade from forming these institutions on the future.
“The RFRA wasn’t meant to force employees to pay a price for their employer’s faith”
This part I don’t really get, because it’s saying that employees shouldn’t be forced to pay a price for their employer’s faith, and what it’s suggesting is that employers are forced to pay the price for something that violates the religious beliefs.
Civil liberties are the freedom to do something, not the freedom to do something and get your employer to pay for it.
You’re pretty consistently missing the point regarding civil liberties, and I’ll take some blame for walking you through a thought exercise.[quote=“JCDenton, post:40, topic:339”]
Instead they just sidestep and say there is no quandry at all.
[/quote]
I did this for the sake of illustrating the fairly obvious logic: that an individual’s rights trump the rights of a private for-profit enterprise. This is pretty much a fundamental principal in the US, even though it’s not expressly enshrined anywhere.
You’re basically putting the rights of a corporation on par with the rights of an individual. They’re not. A corporation cannot have religious beliefs unless they’re a nonprofit with that specific mission (I don’t give a fuck what the Hobby Lobby decision says - that was partisan bullshit). Liberties are given to the individual and exercised as such.
This is a really really really important thing, because a for-profit corporation has all kinds of power and leverage that an individual employee does not. If you say that each has an equal claim to liberties, the corporation’s implementation of those liberties will outweigh that of its employees, which has the net effect of marginalizing the liberties of said employees.
Or: those in a position of greater power exert greater influence. Putting them on a “level playing field” will result in the side with greater influence simply winning.
Hence, an individual’s religious preferences, or lack thereof, are weighed more heavily than an organization’s - because otherwise, the organization would simply use its superior leverage to get its way and marginalize employees based on their religious beliefs.
I don’t trust corporations, and my problem with corporate personhood wasn’t citizens united, it was Buckley v. Valeo, stating that money is speech. I think that a CEO writing an op-ed for the NYT, or giving a speech at a politicians rally, or appearing on CNN and talking about how great a candidate is, is different than giving a politician millions of dollars, even though he may be doing that in his capacity as CEO, so technically the company is paying for it blah blah blah
This is only the case because of the hollowing out of unions, in countries with strong unions (unlike the US and Canada), and with labour shortages (like Canada), they have a more even footing, but this is going off topic
What I want to talk about is the middleground between a multinational conglomerate, and the individual, small business owners. My one friends runs a small restaurant,and is the son of a pastor, very religious. He employees 15 people. I get if he fired someone for having an abortion, that would be a restriction on that person’s liberty, as it would be a financial penalty for an action they chose to take, restrict that person’s freedom. It’s another thing to pay directly for that service through an insurance company (as opposed to indirectly through taxes). So is it okay for him as an individual running a privately held small business to do this? What if he incorporates, and is privately held?
At what point does this go from being okay, to not okay? Does he not have religious expression rights as an owner?
I would argue that regardless of law, that as a person, you may or may not like someone or their choices but a business owner who hires other individuals must definitively give up all personal preferences and views when it comes to how the company handles these issues. And, my limited understanding of US law seems to support that this is the intended law of the land. That even if your company’s core policy and practice and purpose is to further specific religious expressions or perspectives, if someone goes directly against those aims, that may not be grounds for dismissal.
IE: you are a foundation that is specifically against abortion based on religious grounds and perhaps offer services and products that offer alternatives to abortion for newly pregnant women and their families. One of your key employees secretly has an abortion and through some means you find out as an owner. I don’t think there is any basis for that employee to be fired or disciplined or their benefits altered in any way and as an owner you should not even bring it up. There may be specific clauses in a contract which could state otherwise, but we’re arguing vanilla law I think here. Don’t like it? Remove yourself from a position of employing others.
If the employee had an abortion and was public about it or vocal, there might be grounds to say that regardless of what the owners feel of the situation, the business finds that the employee was openly acting contrary to the interests and aims of the company, and that the resulting controversy could threaten the business. And then it could maybe find some actual valid grounds to dismiss the person that way. But, again, I think the argument would have to prove that it was a pure business decision and not influenced by personal beliefs or opinion outside the scope of the business.
The same would be for reversed roles. IF you have a company that is aiming to promote something based on atheistic, anti-religious grounds, and the organization was actively in the act of trying to promote atheism and denouncement of religion… if an employee secretly gets baptized at a church and tells no-one then the owners of the company can’t or shouldn’t do shit. It’s private and secret and only a trusted few might know of this person’s private beliefs. If that person worked for the ‘fuck the religions’ company but was publicly telling people about their baptism and how awesome whatever God they got into is, then, that’s an opening for dismissal since they are advocating against the company’s aims.
How is it going off topic to discuss power, capitalism, and who gets what? You literally started a flamewar about politics, which in a very rudimentary way is how a society distributes what, where, and how. People here have tried to elide the the moral and power dimensions of politics in order to have an easier time making their point. The intersection of the private property regime under capitalism with that of the issues of identity and what working people vs the middling and upper classes deserve is what this all is about. That box cannot be closed because it makes some people’s arguments harder.
I think that Buckley v. Valeo acknowledged a truth about economic power and political power that it sounds like made you uncomfortable in its implications. I may not like Brandeis a lot of the time but he was right when he said “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both” Having a vast amount of inequality gives lie to many of the supposed freedoms that ordinary people possess on paper but cannot exercise in fact. They do have more power and more speech. It is one of the many reasons they shouldn’t exist in the first place.
As for small businesses, fuck them. In my experience small businesses are some of the least dynamic and most regressive portions of society. Having had to deal with many of them in my day the fact that my immediate boss was the owner didn’t make me sympathize with them, it made me resent them more. They offered shit for benefits, low pay, and most small business don’t survive or barely grow. Small business owners and the middling classes are the back bone of reactionary movements throughout history. They are not my friends. If it is a contest between the right of the lord to oppress his serfs and the right of the serfs to not be oppressed I will side with the serfs.
Which is why I support a single payer system that covers EVERYTHING while opposing mandates on buying from a public corporation.
Something is clearly getting lost here and I think part of the problem is that my view does not neatly fit into a political pigeon hole.
I oppose laws that Force a person to purchase something from a corporation that they will never use. Period, full stop. You can plug anything into that belief.
Look at home owners insurance policies. There are certain core items of coverage that everyone has to have and they are all things that you will possibly need at some point in time. You don’t want to have to use them but they are there if the need should arrive. Now there are also optional buys such as earthquake and flood insurance. These are not mandated to be in every policy but they are available if you NEED them.
The argument I am hearing is that it is OK for the government to force all buyers of home owners insurance to carry flood and earthquake coverage so it increases the pool and makes this insurance cheaper for those people who actually need such coverage. It is not a perfect analogy (half of homeowners do not live in earthquake/flood zones) but it is similar enough.
Now, if the government simply took over the home insurance market and we all paid into it into an equitable manner (percentage of property valuation for example) then we as a people are agreeing to expand the social contract to cover this. The government simply telling everyone that they have to buy it privately is not the same thing. It is closer to a welfare payout to the insurance companies.
[quote=“JCDenton, post:48, topic:339”]
Does he not have religious expression rights as an owner?
[/quote]Sure he does, and he can exercise that right to expression by decorating or having prayers before meals or pretty much anything else.
He’s in a position of power over his employees, though. So long as power is inequitable, those with less power require additional support. I don’t care how small the business is - 15 people are financially dependent on him, which means he exerts a lot of leverage.
Also, I fail to see how a government mandate for employers to provide insurance with certain minimum coverage in any way prevents the free exercise of religion. Your friend has the power to express whatever he wants, but does not have the power to impose limitations on anyone who is not a member of his religion. That’s straight-up not allowed in the US, and it shouldn’t be - why should someone of one religion force people not of that religion to behave in the way their religion dictates? That’s a direct violation of personal religious freedom.
“Freedom of” inherently includes “freedom from,” in other words.
Your logic is really not substantially different than saying that an employer can instruct employees not to buy birth control with their paycheck. After all, they spent money on that employee, so they should be able to get the employee they want, right?
Then why is it only people on the right that actually go out and fight for civil liberties, like the ability to braid hair, or own a gun? Why is it that only the right fights for the right to be able to paint nails in Texas, move to Maine, and not have to go to cosmotology school for 2 years? The left isn’t intrinsically pro license, but they don’t spend any political capital on getting rid of them when they’re crony capitalist protectionist measures
I think the distinction I was having a problem with, is that when the employer is buying healthcare on behalf of the employees, is it already the employees, in which case they can spend it how they wish, or is it still the employers. Since we don’t have that type of system here, it wasn’t a clear distinction for me. If it’s “already the employees money”, then that makes total sense and I agree with it, I was viewing it more from the perspective of my experience with it, where some places I worked had a drug plan, and some places I worked at didn’t. And the different places I worked at had different things covered by the drug plans, so to me it doesn’t seem foreign at all, for a drug plan to not cover 4 types of contraceptives, and to cover 16 other types (like Hobby Lobby does/did).
Is this what you actually think? Because that takes a lot of willful ignorance to actually believe. There are way way way more civil liberties than gun ownership.[quote=“JCDenton, post:56, topic:339”]
or is it still the employers.
[/quote]Generally, health insurance is part of an employee’s compensation package. An employer will negotiate with an insurance company to purchase a bunch of health insurance packages and pays a significant portion of that insurance cost. The employee also pays a chunk of that cost in every paycheck.
Basically, individual employers use bulk purchasing to negotiate discounted health insurance packages, and those packages form part of the offer of employment. The employee pays part of that cost as well, but it’s generally way cheaper for them to get the employer-negotiated insurance than any other option.
And by “cheaper” I mean “actually affordable,” because otherwise private health insurance is murderously expensive.
For example: in March, my annual salary will be ~$72k a year. My employer - the state of New York - subsidizes my health plan by paying roughly $28k a year. I pay about $200/month as my share of that health insurance premium.
So basically, my job is worth ~$100k/year in a pure market, but my employer reduces my compensation in exchange for getting me insurance that I couldn’t otherwise get. It’s a good tradeoff, or at least the best I can get in this country.
Single-payer would be substantially superior, because then you can leverage the buying power of an entire country (which is one reason why Canadians pay a lot less for prescription drugs than we do) and get a very competitive price.
But we can’t do that here because socialism and fuck the poor.
Does New York State offer a public option for state employees or is it all private plans?
I know CT has the Husky program of which I have heard nothing but good things about from friends who use it. Though I think that might only be for low income folks.
Yup! It’s called The Empire Plan, and it’s awesome. Well, mostly, anyhow. It’s your cheapest insurance option (premium is $32 per pay period for an individual), it provides very comprehensive coverage, and you can have its cost subsidized as part of your pension.
The downside is that not all providers will take it, but there’s a fantastic provider directory that lets you figure out who takes what. It also doesn’t have a “couples” option like some HMO’s, so your choices are individual for $32 or “family” for about 3.5 times that amount. Of course, “family” covers an unlimited number of people in the family, so it’s badass for prolific parents.
If we could provide that as a basic option to every New Yorker, things would be pretty grand.
I might be out of the loop here, but do you not have the ability to paint your own nails, or braid your own hair without a license in the US?
If so, then that’s odd.
If not, and they only restrict commerce involving those things, please show me where it says you have an inalienable right to braid hair or paint nails for money without a license. Because it sure as hell seems that your rights are still intact, since much like your rights to do as you please end where the other chap’s nose begins, as you so helpfully said, you right to paint nails and braid hair as you please ends at the other chap’s nails and hair-ends, respectively.
None of them relate to the ability to eat cookies either.
Your oddly specific focus on those three things lead me to believe that you have some personal connection to someone who was affected by this, and really makes no sense. For a rebuttal as to why the regulations you seem to find so abhorent are important, I redirect you to Kate’s post, where it was articulated far better than I could.
Nope, it’s perfectly legal to do to yourself. We’re talking about spas/nail salons/hairdresser type situations.