When religious persons control private, for profit businesses, what rights do they have over you as your employer?
Could they make you go to church on Sunday? Could they make you kneel in prayer five times a day?
But this past Tuesday, March 25, (CLICK HERE) the Supreme Court of the United States began hearing oral arguments about whether private businesses with devout owners should be exempt from providing health plans to employees under the Affordable Care Act that include access to contraception.
It's sometimes known as the Hobby Lobby case, named for one of the companies that sued because its religious owners believes that God prohibits contraception.
That Hobby Lobby would take this matter all the way to the Supreme Court tells me those owners truly believe they would end up in hell if they obeyed that law.
So the court has a tough decision to make. They really should have refused to hear this case and leave things as they are.
The Supreme Court is not above God, although some of the Justices seem to believe that they are god like, but I don't imagine it wants to be seen as forcing Americans to do what sends them to hell.
I should also point out there are many things that can get you sent to hell. We all know religious persons who feel that one or two recent wars that they were forced to pay for, as well as our entire nuclear arsenal, are a clear violation of at least one of the major commandments.
So if the Supreme Court is going to protect one person's religious sensitivities over how the government forces them to spend their money, wouldn't they have to do the same for everybody?
I doubt that would happen, as our so called unbiased legal system in the United States is dysfunctionally unequal when it comes to providing equal justice for all.
Religion has no place has no place in the US Supreme Court. Religion, or the lack thereof, is such a deeply, deeply personal thing. People who think they've got a personal pipeline to the divine make me nervous. People in power who think they've got a personal pipeline to the divine make me even more nervous.
Religion has been used in this country to justify all sorts of evil things, hatred of people who are "different", intolerance, ignorance, edifice complexes of expensive buildings while the poor are often ignored, massive coverups of children being abused by those who wear the cloak of god It encourages revisionist thinking, like the Texas Board of Education's reshaping American history in its textbooks.
And unless you've pulled some mystical magic trick, died, crossed over to the great beyond and come back again, how do you really know what God's thinking? If, that is, He/She exists at all.
Well the Supreme Court is going to eventually tell us their answers to these questions and it will become the law.
No doubt in my mind, that win or lose, a whole lot of innocent people will be going to hell thanks to whatever the Supreme Courts decision will be.
