March for Life’s beliefs are based solely on non-religious ethics and science, while its two employees who joined the suit additionally claimed faith-based reasons for objecting to the mandate.
“If the purpose of the religious employer exemption is, as HHS states, to respect the anti-abortifacient tenets of an employment relationship, then it makes no rational sense-indeed, no sense whatsoever to deny March for Life that same respect,” explains the decision.
What connects the above to today’s decisions in Washington is the slapdash contempt of Anthony Kennedy’s opinion. Whatever the merits of gay marriage, it ought to revolt anyone with a decent respect for self-government that this incompetent jurist could find no other way to frame the issue than to besmirch the motives of those who oppose him. As Justice Scalia wrote:
To defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement… It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.
What I always objected to in Canada about Section 13 was its casual contempt for the citizenry, the same contempt on display today in Washington and London. Like Theresa May, Justice Kennedy would rather impute motive than engage argument. The need to delegitimize those who disagree does indeed “demean this institution”, and is profoundly disturbing.
by Doug Lawrence
The Supreme Court today defined the number one issue for the 2012 election: ObamaCare.
If you like ObamaCare … vote for Barack Obama and his fellow socialist democrats, who have pledged to foist the program on Americans, no matter the cost.
If you don’t like ObamaCare … vote for Mitt Romney and his fellow conservative republicans, who have pledged to repeal it.
It doesn’t get much simpler than that!
As for the court … those guys are lucky they’re appointed for life, and not subject to getting reelected.
Walter Hoye, a minister and self-described “sidewalk counselor,” opposes abortion and seeks to convince women to eschew the procedure. After being convicted of two separate violations of the ordinance, he filed a federal complaint alleging violations of his free-speech and due-process rights.
While courts subsequently reversed Hoye’s two convictions on procedural grounds, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer dismissed the minister’s civil rights complaint, finding that the Oakland’s ordinance is content-neutral and therefore constitutional.
A three-judge appellate panel sitting in San Francisco agreed, but only partly.
While the ordinance, modeled after a Colorado law upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court more than a decade ago in Hill v. Colorado, is constitutional, Oakland failed to enforce it properly, the 9th Circuit found.
The appellate judges cited the testimony of an Oakland police officer who said that the ordinance is generally applied “only to efforts to persuade women approaching reproductive health clinics not to receive abortions or other reproductive health services, and not to communications seeking to encourage entry into the clinic for the purpose of undergoing treatment.”
Hoye also alleged that the “escorts” often tell women not to listen to him or take his literature, and they attempt to block his message by putting up barriers and making noise, the ruling states.
“The city’s policy of distinguishing between speech that facilitates access to clinics and speech that discourages access is not content-neutral,” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for the unanimous panel. “It is the epitome of a content-based speech restriction.”
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Site 