Hobby Lobby just got a religious exemption from science. Yes, science.

Monday's Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case honestly makes me sick.

As a woman, some guy who pays me can now also tell me that my hard-earned company health insurance can't cover my no-baby-candies because he thinks it might have some sort of voodoo power that kills phantom babies. Fortunately, I work at a company where that wouldn't be the case. (Uh, right?)

As a queer woman, it makes me want to shake every LGBT person who doesn't see the broader implications of this. What if a company could tell employees that they won't pay for insurance that covers HIV treatment or health care to transgender people because of owners' "sincerely held religious beliefs"? Justice Samuel Alito, in writing the majority opinion, promised its scope was "very specific." Still, some of us side with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and foresee a potential onslaught of legal challenges testing the limits.

Remember Arizona's hideous religious exemptions law and how ridiculously long it took for Gov. Jan Brewer to veto it? It would have applied to much more than contraceptives. Well, now any company that is majority-owned by five or fewer people can make health care decisions for its female employees based on owners' religious beliefs. That's 90 percent of American businesses, people! Arizona was a hot, dusty, turquoise-wearing drop in the bucket compared to nine out of every 10 companies in the United States and more than half our entire workforce.

First, here's an overly simplified breakdown of how this stuff works: If you're not pregnant, the pill will keep you un-pregnant. If you're pregnant and you keep taking the pill, you're basically just swallowing bland tablets. It's not doing anything. Plan B? Basically a megadose of the pill, to keep those eggs in place. It doesn't kill sperm. It doesn't kill embryos. It doesn't kill anything. A woman can still get pregnant, even if she takes Plan B and stands on her head for an hour. And those IUDs may look a little scary, but there's no abortion happening. Those devices trick your body into thinking you're pregnant, without the side effect of babies.

The science people say these methods of birth control prevent pregnancy and don't terminate pregnancies.

Here's how The New York Times very clearly reported this misunderstanding in a 2012 story: "It turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work. Because they block creation of fertilized eggs, they would not meet abortion opponents definition of abortion-inducing drugs."

Hobby Lobby and its supporters don't care, nor do they wish to understand, that this pill has enabled generations of women to claim so many of the societal rights that we have earned. Except that we really don't have those rights in reality, because in the eyes of these five male windbags who sit on the Supreme Court and the dozens of companies that backed Hobby Lobby in this lawsuit, women are incapable of making their own medical decisions.

This ruling says that people who are somehow smart enough to own companies now have the First Amendment right to practice stupidity. Literally, stupidity.

Here is the original post:
Op-ed: Hobby Lobby and the Constitutional Right to Be Stupid