So the nightmare scenarios unfold.
I like the Scientologist not covering antidepressants, the
Jehovah’s Witness not paying for blood transfusions and the Christian
Scientists not paying for anything. But my personal favorite is the one that could
happen to me: my employer hires a new administrator who decides my three interracial children should
not be covered for anything because the Bible says miscegenation is
immoral and any illness would be God’s just punishment for my sin. Hard to say
what’s worse: All the terrible things that religious zealots have now been
empowered to do to the rest of us or listening to them preening and crowing
about their victory for religious freedom. There’s more blowback on the way too
here
and here.
The slippery slope is now in the rear view mirror folks. We’re in the shit.
But when you really think about it, maybe this isn’t going
to pan out the way everybody thinks. I’m not so sure it’s as good as the Right
thinks or as bad as the Left believes. Let’s speculate:
A furniture manufacturer in North Carolina won’t cover
anybody who’s gay because they just lost their fight to fire them outright. A
chicken processing plant won’t cover anybody who’s Catholic because they object
to Papists. A Saudi Arabian consortium gains a controlling interest in GM. They
instruct their insurance provider that any ailments traceable to alcohol or
pork consumption will no longer be covered. Nobody covers Jews anywhere for
anything. A group of Catholics in the chicken place sues in court for unfair
discrimination. A group of Fundamentalist Protestants working at the furniture
shop sue because they don’t think the Catholics should be covered by their
employer. Muslim employees of GM sue because they don’t want anything covered for the Infidels. Jews
start suing everybody.
The court system becomes paralyzed with suits and counter
suits all alleging infringement on our constitutionally guaranteed religious right to exclude everybody we don't like from having anything we feel they shouldn't have. The courts
have to choose which laws to ignore and which to follow, anti discrimination
laws or pro religious bigotry statutes. These back their way up to the Supreme
Court and Antonin Scalia has a stroke trying to read them all and untangle the legal knot he tied with his Hobby Lobby decision. He dies in the emergency
waiting room while the hospital administrators are trying to determine if he’s
excluded from coverage because he’s a Papist or because he's an Italian.
President Paul declares the date of his death a National Health Care Free
Holiday on which absolutely no American citizen connected to the Health Care Industrial
Complex has to work and if you split your head open on a rusting factory gate
you’re just shit out of luck.
Finally, the corporate CEOs get together and decide they’ve had enough and
sue all their employees. In a unanimous decision, the Court agrees with the
corporations that if their employees want religiously acceptable health care
they should get it from their churches. “Let Dolan put it
where his fucking mouth is,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes in her majority opinion.
And why not? Why should employers be in the health care
business in the first place? Who’s the genius that put those two together and
where can we find him? Our religious leaders, the nation’s moral compass, when faced with the logistics of actually carrying out Christ’s
call to heal the sick shit
their pants and then do what all the rest of us less-holier-than-them do in an ethical conundrum. They blame the federal government for its ineptitude and inaction and
call on it to fill the vacuum.
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