What the Hobby Lobby Decesion Means to Women

On Monday, June 30th, the Supreme Court ruled that family-owned corporations are not required to provide their employees with insurance coverage for birth control, siting federal protection of religious freedom. The judgment was in favor of the retail franchise Hobby Lobby. In this latest effort to abort Obamacare, the target was focused on the health care act

Justice Samuel Alito ruled that the federal law protecting religious freedom could in fact be allocated to for-profit corporations whose owners stand by faithfully held religious “moralities.” A corporation claims its religious beliefs (as if for-profit entities can have religious beliefs) are being violated by having to provide birth control through their insurance plans, yet it can invest in the very pharmaceutical companies that produce these birth-control products. I am personally not a fan of Obamacare, but in siding with Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court may have just opened the doors for other companies to cite their religious freedoms as the basis for ‘other’ religious discrimination.

In an effort to avoid the inevitable backlash that would arrive from the concerns of the LGBT community along with others, Justice Alito used racial discrimination as an example in his majority opinion. He wrote that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act could not be used to protect discrimination in hiring as a religious practice. In an agreeing pronouncement, Justice Anthony Kennedy stressed that the judgment should not be used outside the birth control dispute. But by not addressing LGBT rights unambiguously, there’s no actual resolve to the issue. The court is apparently trying to suggest that this is a narrow ruling, but unless their reasoning is that women’s health is less important, why is contraception distinctive?

The puncturing of Obamacare isn’t what’s troubling me about this ruling; as a business owner and author of the best-selling and award winning book, Sell Your Business For More Than It’s Worth, I feel that the Affordable Care Act will be detrimental to small businesses and franchises. I am not in support of the government forcing businesses to provide the heath care required by Obamacare, I believe that the entire system should be removed. What concerns me is the ruling itself. On the surface, the decision on the case, Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, may appear to be about free speech and religious freedoms, but it is symbolic of a more insidious issue that lingers in America — the struggle for power over women. Despite all the progress that has been made regarding women’s rights, which solely include reproductive rights, we still have to fight tooth and nail just to have control over our own bodies. If women do not begin to stand up and protest these crucial issues, we’re going to be barefoot and pregnant in the 21st Century.

– See more at: http://michelletuckerinternational.com/barefoot-pregnant-the-hobby-lobby-judgment/#sthash.kqvlSqQ9.dpuf