since we all live and work together, of course it does.
it means your kid’s best friend has to watch their parent die an awful death. it means your school is short more teachers. it means some great invention or kind word will never happen. it means your hospital is dealing with preventable diseases and the doctors are too overwhelmed to help you
lack of medical care for our neighbors affects us all
HIV is a virus, it does not care who you have sex with, share needles with, or bleed on (hopefully this last bit is accidental). It’s disturbing to me, while the US is still suffering COVID (and now monkeypox), there’s a judge with bigotry seated so deep, he would condemn innocent people to die from a preventable virus.
Disgusting is the word I’m searching for, but it’s not strong enough.
But of course, there are still people who absolutely do not believe that people who contract HIV are innocent, but are suffering “god’s punishment” for their “ungodly” behavior…
Surprisingly, the latter is not a requirement for the former.
It was always clear that the right’s notion of “religious freedom” had, as its end point: “my religion says you shouldn’t exist, therefore it’s my ‘right’ to kill you.” I just really didn’t think we’d be seeing it in practice so soon. I guess the message is only going to get more explicit from here.
Christ, what an asshole.
Is this one of those “In the US, all kinds of official positions that really ought to require specific skills and knowledge are for some reason instead elected” things? Like elected sheriffs and the like?
as i said above, they know what they’re doing. they’re not dumb people. if anything, they’re smart enough to use the law and courts to provide a veneer to justify their bigotry
lots of smart capable people want power over other people. if they were dumb, they wouldn’t be able to cause this much harm
I dont see how switching to single-payer system retards the ability of religious hate-groups to file lawsuits and get them appealed to a hate-friendly SCOTUS.
Because the Federal government has no “deeply held beliefs” not specifically outlined the US Constitution, subsequent Amendments and Federal compiled law.
The basis for this lawsuit is that the company was being forced to pay money to a private insurance provider which offered services that violated the owners’ religious beliefs.
This ruling was a very shitty legal opinion but still had more basis in legal precedent than, say, a religious business owner claiming they shouldn’t have to pay taxes because the public schools teach kids evolution in violation of their personal religious beliefs.
Please, don’t give them ideas!
That wouldn’t work—for SOME REASON these arguments are only ever taken seriously when they’re an excuse to mistreat women and LGBTQ people 
The same logic would seem to support a “religious freedom” to discriminate against, for instance, interracial couples—but “religious freedom” advocates INSIST that’s completely different
On typical showing, they will continue insisting that they would never even think of doing that, right up until the moment they start implementing it.
Actually, they are pushing to make a single-prayer system mandatory.
Oh, are they implementing austerity measures with their hopes and prayers too now? Is it just one hope and one prayer per person? I guess that’s predictable enough.
Except that, no, that wasn’t the claim at all. The company made no claim about the service (ie. the drug or how the drug worked). The drug itself wasn’t claimed to have violated anything. The company made the claim that the drug encouraged behavior that violated the company’s religious beliefs. It’s an important distinction, and an incredibly insidious precedent if allowed to stand. It goes way beyond the Hobby Lobby BS, which was a claim that birth control in and of itself violated their beliefs. In this case, it would be as if Hobby Lobby claimed that birth control encouraged premarital sex, which they opposed.
But they’d have no legal standing to make that complaint if health care was decoupled from employment entirely via a single-payer system. They were only able to file this lawsuit because they were the ones paying for the drugs through their employees’ insurance plans.
Which really brings us back around to why the suit, and the ruling as well, are so bigoted. If the employers had told their employees, “don’t have homosexual relations, because we don’t want to pay for your HIV drugs,” the employers would be in deep shit for harassing a protected class. So what this judge has ruled instead, is that they can skip the memo and just live in a bigoted state of being that is now the new normal for millions of people.
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