Good morning!

Texas, Georgia, Iowa and Boston, “sucks”: I have clicked over and read all of your writes. All I can say is “Sick, sick, and more sick.”

By the way…Arizona sucks too.

Arizona On Steroids

Will the Supreme Court Issue a License to Discriminate?

The nationwide outcry over Arizona’s anti-LGBT law was swift and severe. Amid mounting pressure from leading Republicans in her own state as well as the business community and others, Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the law on Wednesday night.

Unfortunately, Arizona is far from the only state where lawmakers are contemplating bills that would give the government, private businesses, and others the a license to discriminate under the guise of “religious liberty.” As Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards wrote yesterday, “this didn’t start with Arizona, and it won’t end with Arizona.”

Indeed, proposals similar to the Arizona law have been introduced recently in states across the country, including Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Kansas, and South Dakota, and Tennessee.

The Missouri proposal was actually introduced in attempt to model the Arizona bill, but the backlash over Arizona helped propel measures in other states to outright defeat or at least has them on ice for the moment.

As bad as these bills are, they pale in comparison to the damage the Supreme Court could do with an erroneous ruling in the upcoming Hobby Lobby andConestoga Wood cases. While these cases are specifically about the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit, the High Court could open the floodgates to discrimination in the name of religious belief.

ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser explains how the Supreme Court could essentially impose an Arizona-style law on steroids nationwide:

If this issue sounds familiar, it should, because it’s the exact same issue behind two of the most high profile Supreme Court cases being hear this term — Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius. In both of those cases, for-profit businesses object, on religious liberty grounds, to complying with Obama Administration rules increasing access to birth control. One of the most important questions presented by both cases is whether a for-profit corporation can have religious faith at all, and if so, whether it can use that supposed faith as the basis for a legal claim.

So if the Supreme Court agrees with the plaintiffs in these cases that corporations aren’t just people, but they can also be people of faith, the outcome will be very similar to what would happen if Congress had taken the bill Brewer just vetoed, passed it at the federal level and then President Obama had signed it into law — except, of course, for the fact that no one on the Supreme Court was actually elected to make law.

Last year, some of our Center for American Progress colleagues wrote about the dangerous slippery slope we could all go sliding down if the Supreme Court agrees that corporations are not only people, but people entitled to religious beliefs. Such a decision poses a very real threat to core civil rights protections in this country:

• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, or religion. But if for-profit corporations have religious beliefs, they will be able to argue they have the right to side-step Title VII and, for example, hire only those who sign a “statement of faith” or share the same religious beliefs.

• The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which is part of Title VII, protects against sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, but for-profit corporations may try and use their newly found religious rights to fire unmarried pregnant employees.

• The Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, or religion, unless you qualify for certain religious organizations exemptions. If for-profit corporations have religious rights, then property-management firms may argue their religious beliefs do not support certain lifestyles such as living together before marriage. They may choose not to rent or sell to those engaging in the unapproved conduct.

• Many states have public accommodations laws that prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation. A holding that a corporation can be exempt from basically any federal law because of its owners’ religious beliefs could lead to similar state law exemptions. (See Elane Photography v. Willock.)

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments in these cases on March 25, so the timing of this growing national backlash against discrimination under the guise of religious liberty could not be better. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is frequently the Court’s swing vote, has a long history of supporting LGBT rights, including authoring last year’s historic decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. That decision has nationwide marriage equality barreling back toward the Supreme Court at breakneck speed.

As Millhiser wrote earlier this week, the Arizona backlash could be of tremendous benefit in the upcoming cases:

The last time a conflict between gay rights and religious conservatives reached the Supreme Court, Kennedy broke with his fellow conservatives and sided with gay equality. [...]

But if Kennedy views Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood and a broad attack on the idea that religious employers have to comply with the law, and specifically, with laws protecting gay people, then he is much more likely to uphold the birth control rules.

The plaintiffs’ legal theory in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood would, in the words of a brief filed by attorneys from Lambda Legal, “mark a sea change – not only in allowing business owners’ religious views about family planning to burden decisions employees are entitled to make for themselves, but also in opening the door to similar denials of equal compensation, health care access, and other equitable treatment for LGBT people, persons with HIV, and anyone else whose family life or health need diverges from their employers’ religious convictions.” If birth control loses in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, it is all but certain that gay rights will be next on the chopping block.

Stay tuned for more on the potential consequences of the Hobby Lobby case.

BOTTOM LINE: Religious liberty is a core American value and progressives believe in religious liberty for all, not just for some. Religious liberty means religious liberty for everyone. And that includes the freedom from having the theological doctrines of your boss or those of business owners in your community being forced upon you.

The Arizona law and the upcoming Supreme Court cases are not really about religious liberty, they are about minority of individuals seeking a license to ignore laws and regulations they disagree with in order to discriminate against LGBT people, women, and others.

*****

So…here is the latest discrimination against women in Arizona:

After Failing To Pass Anti-Gay Bill, Arizona Turns Its Attention To Attacking Abortion Rights

All eyes were on Arizona this past week, after the legislature approved an anti-gay bill that would allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals under the guise of preserving religious liberty. The intense national backlash culminated in Gov. Jan Brewer’s (R) decision to veto the legislation. But that doesn’t mean the lawmakers in the Grand Canyon State are putting controversial social issues to rest.

Just one day after Brewer’s widely publicized veto, lawmakers in Arizona advanced new legislation to attack abortion rights. HB 2284, misleadingly named the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” would allow for surprise inspections at abortion clinics to try to catch them violating state law. The measure also stipulates that abortion clinics need to “report whenever an infant is born alive after a botched abortion and report what is done to save that child’s life,” inflammatory language that the anti-choice community often deploys to suggest that some doctors arecommitting infanticide.

HB 2284 is being spearheaded by the Center for Arizona Policy, or CAP, the same right-wing group that was behind the controversial “right to discriminate” bill.

State lawmakers gave the measure preliminary approval on Thursday. “I mean, for goodness’ sake, we even do unannounced inspections of Burger King and McDonald’s, but we’re not allowing them at abortion clinics?” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R), the bill’s sponsor, said during the legislative hearing on the measure.

In reality, Lesko’s legislation is seeking to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Abortion is already one of the safest medical procedures in the country, and the clinics that perform these procedures are already highly regulated. There’s no good reason to single out abortion providers for this additional red tape. Enacting these type of laws simply gives abortion opponents the opportunity to triggerstate investigations — and, depending on the political affiliations of the people who serve on state health boards, this can be an avenue to force clinics out of business.

“As an organization, we support bills that truly protect patient safety, but House Bill 2284 opens the door to provider and patient harassment,” Jodi Liggett, the director of public policy for Planned Parenthood Arizona, told ThinkProgress in a statement.

HB 2284 is part of a coordinated strategy to close abortion clinics that’s advancingacross the country. And it’s also a clear reminder that, regardless of Brewer’s recent veto, the fight against “religious liberty” legislation isn’t over. This line of argument is driving efforts to restrict LGBT rights in other states across the country — and it’s directly related to attacks on reproductive freedom, too.

Anti-choice legislation often stems from the same right-wing worldview that rejects LGBT rights. Indeed, those are the two issues that the “pro-life and pro-family” Center for Arizona Policy is primarily concerned about — and HB 2284 is hardly the right-wing group’s first foray into abortion policy. CAP also spearheaded the state’s 20-week abortion ban, a restrictive measure that’s been repeatedlyblocked in court. It was the primary impetus behind another anti-choice law that got thrown out by the courts, an effort to strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood because of its affiliation with abortion. Most recently, CAP even threatened to torpedo Medicaid expansion in the state by pushing to defund Planned Parenthood.

On the surface, the state-level push to restrict abortion tends to be framed in terms of “keeping women safe” rather than specifically in terms of religious liberty. But the argument that businesses should have the right to deny services because of their religious beliefs is also doing significant damage to this aspect of women’s health care. For instance, the one in six American patients who are served in Catholic hospitals can’t receive any type of abortion care there, even in cases of dire emergency. This past December, the ACLU sued the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, arguing that those harsh restrictions are forcing hospitals to deliver substandard care to their patients.

This issue extends far beyond Catholic-affiliated institutions. The current legal fight over Obamacare’s contraceptive provision, which allows insured women to have access to birth control at no additional cost to them, is based on the notion that for-profit companies have the “religious liberty” to refuse health care services. And the lawmakers who advocate for abortion restrictions aren’t necessarily shy about articulating their policy positions from an explicitlyconservative religious framework.

“When it comes to attempts to use religion as a cloak for discrimination against the LGBT community and against women’s reproductive rights, the fight isn’t over. We’re seeing these attacks across the country,” Sharon Levin, the director of federal reproductive rights policy for the National Women’s Law Center, told ThinkProgress. “And toward the end of March, at the Supreme Court of the United States, business will be making the same arguments that were made in Arizona — pushing to allow for-profit businesses to evade complying with a law that would require contraceptive coverage.”

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, echoes those sentiments. “This didn’t start with Arizona, and it won’t end with Arizona,” Richards writes in an op-ed recently published in the Huffington Post. “This most recent legislation is part of an orchestrated and radical effort to extend religious liberties to corporations — to treat private businesses like churches under the law, by giving them the right to refuse services, deny health care coverage, and discriminate against people.”

According to Levin, there are important parallels to draw between the recent controversy in Arizona and the broader conservative push to twist religious liberty into something that doesn’t resemble what that term has typically encompassed. That certainly impacts the LGBT community, but also ends up hurting other groups, too.

“Religious liberty is not about harming others and imposing your religion on them,” she noted. “It’s critical to think about, as people did in response to the Arizona bill, about who is really being harmed here and what’s the harm that’s being done. Here, it’s women.”

*****

Readers: Yeah, I’ll say it again, “Arizona Sucks.” What do you have to say? It’s Friday. Start Flapping.

Peace out. 

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

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