Conservative Whining About Whore Pills Might Go to the Supreme Court

As we approach the date of the implementation of the biggest, bulkiest piece of Obamacare and (if you ask a Tea Partier) THE END OF FREEDOM AND LIBERTY FOREVER BENGAZI!, lawsuits protesting the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate continue to push their way through the the sluggish peristalsis of the court system. And now, it looks like the slut lozenge-averse right wing might have their chance to whine before the Supreme Court.

Hobby Lobby, a store that sells cheap crap for people to hot glue together as an outlet for their long-ago suffocated creative impulses, is owned by a conservative Christian family who believes — against scientific evidence — that Plan B and IUD’s cause abortions (they also believe, again contrary to what is provable by science, that life begins at conception because SPERM ARE MAGIC). They also believe that the Constitution protects their right to use their secular corporation as an instrument of their religious faith, and that their specific chosen belief structure grants them the inalienable right to interfere with their employees’ health care choices as mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

While the whole thing seems terribly stupid, the court battle around the birth control mandate has been a bit of a clusterfuck. From TPM,

U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton in July granted the Hobby Lobby craft store chain and Mardel Christian bookstore, its sister company, a temporary exemption from a requirement that it provide insurance coverage for morning-after pills, similar emergency birth control methods and intrauterine devices.

[…]

Heaton last November rejected companies’ request to block the birth-control mandate. He reconsidered his decision after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the companies were likely to prevail in the case. Heaton ruled in June that the company would not be subject to fines of up to $1.3 million a day for not offering the birth control methods.

Well this sure sounds like much ado about zygotes.

Again: no one is forcing Hobby Lobby employees to go out and have unprotected nonmarital sex with atheists while watching Paris is Burning stoned out of their gourds on pot-laced brownies (although tbh that’s super fun and if you’re reading this, Hobby Lobby employees, I highly recommend you try it). Opponents of the birth control mandate harp on the fact that they don’t wish to subsidize a person’s lifestyle choice about which they disapprove, but here are some lifestyle choices that hyper religious self-proclaimed “pro life” business owners have no problem subsidizing: war, a cruel and racist for-profit prison system, an immigration enforcement system that shatters families, the death penalty, etc etc etc. Why is it only worth going to court over if it involves a woman having sex without suffering “consequences”?

We’ll know by October 1st whether the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. In the meantime, pop some popcorn. It’s about to get apoplectic in here.