What Every LGBT Person Needs To Know About The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court Decision

The Supreme Court handed the anti-gay religious right $2 billion corporation Hobby Lobby a victory today. The rest of the anti-gay religious right is of course already claiming a win it does not have. Here are a few facts that every LGBT and progressive person needs to know about today’s historic ruling.

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby this morning, religious right activists claimed a momentous victory that just doesn’t exist. It was as if on your first week of a diet you lost three pounds but told all the world you lost 30. Or, even, 300. 

Here are key quotes directly from the text of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. You should send each of them to all your friends, post this to Facebook and Twitter, and tell the radical anti-gay, anti-women, anti-family religious right they’re just plain lying.

LOOK: Hobby Lobby: Read The Complete Full Supreme Court Decision

From the Court’s ruling (bolding ours):

This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs. Nor does it provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.

And,

The principal dissent raises the possibility that discrim- ination in hiring, for example on the basis of race, might be cloaked as religious practice to escape legal sanction. See post, at 32–33. Our decision today provides no such shield. The Government has a compelling interest in providing an equal opportunity to participate in the workforce without regard to race, and prohibitions on racial discrimination are precisely tailored to achieve that critical goal.

Sadly and unsurprisingly, the ruling does not mention anti-LGBT discrimination, nor does it mention gender discrimination. The majority opinion in today’s 5-4 ruling was written by Justice Alito. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas — all men. 

The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Ginsburg. 

Her concerns are, essentially, that this ruling is “extreme” and “extraordinary” and opens a door to further ground-gaining by the religious right.

“In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs,” a clearly concerned Justice Ginsburg writes.

Ginsburg, who was joined in her dissent by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor, also discusses the role the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), signed by President Bill Clinton, had on today’s ruling.

“In the Court’s view, RFRA demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith—in these cases, thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga or dependents of persons those corporations employ. Persuaded that Congress enacted RFRA to serve a far less radical purpose, and mindful of the havoc the Court’s judgment can introduce, I dissent.”

Bottom line: the ruling, as NBC News’ Pete Williams reports, “appeared to be a clear victory for the companies that brought the case and for perhaps 50 to 60 other companies like them with similar objections to the contraceptive requirement.”

If it is later applied to cases involving minorities, like LGBT persons, it is being misused. Again, it clearly states that it cannot “provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.”

Will it? Wait and see.

 

Image by Yale Democrats via Twitter