Isn’t there any religion that objects to Viagra?
by digby
Katha Pollit has written a righteous retort to those who insist that the Hobby Lobby case is just a little inconvenience and that women should pipe down because there’s no way this reasoning could ever extend to really important stuff. Here’s just a little taste:
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues in her stirring dissent, there’s “little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood—combined with its other errors in construing RFRA—invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.” The reason it’s unlikely the Supreme Court would uphold a religious exemption for vaccinations or blood transfusions is not something intrinsic to those claims; it’s simply that Alito finds them weird. Birth control is banned by the Bible? Sure. Blood transfusions are banned by the Bible? Don’t be silly. For now. We have no idea, really, how far the Court might be willing to extend RFRA. Could a CEO refuse to pay childbirth costs for unmarried women? Could he pay married men more because that’s what the Lord wants? (Actually, he’s probably already doing that.) But here’s my prediction: the day a religious exemption burdens by so much as a mouse’s whisker the right of men to protect their own bodies from unwanted, well, anything, is the day the Supreme Court Five discover that religion is not so deserving of deference after all.
She’s right. And all you have to do to prove it is look at the vast amount of sexist and misogynist commentary being vomited forth by the right wing in the wake of this decision. Like good old Rush:
“[Some people] treat pregnancy as a great imposition that women need to be protected from.And yet, they wouldn’t have the problem if they didn’t do a certain thing.”
I’m going to guess it wouldn’t be much of a burden on women to refuse to do that “certain thing” with Rush (or any of the “other things” that Rush apparently likes to do.) But I’d think that most men would prefer that their wives and girlfriends want to do that certain thing and don’t really think it’s a good idea to have families consisting of 15 or 16 children.
I just can’t get over the idea that they really seem to think it makes sense to real people in the real world that birth control is some kind of recreational drug for slutty bimbos. Meanwhile, horny guys like Limbaugh are popping Viagra three at a time. And it’s paid for by insurance. Are there no religious objections to that?
Bueller????
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