Hobby Lobby’s Religion Hobby

Hobby Lobby’s owners have religious beliefs — but should that be enough to place them above the law?

What can you say about Hobby Lobby? It seems one of their “hobbies” as a corporate entity is religion.

The proposition that a company or a corporation can have religious beliefs seems laughable on its face – and yet, the highest court in the land agreed that it can.

This Supreme Court is the most radical ever. They strike down precedent like it means nothing at all, they empower faceless corporations at every opportunity, and they recently set back voting rights by fifty years. And they’re not done yet.

What I call the “Extreme Supreme 5” – Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy – should be impeached for their many anti-democratic decisions that empower corporations as “persons.” These decisions are eroding the very fabric of our democratic republic, and allowing corporate power to overly influence our elected representatives.

Yes, it’s highly unlikely that impeachment could ever happen. It takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove a federal judge, and that’s after the House votes to impeach — a combination that is nearly impossible in our two-party system.

But, as Nathan Newman, founder of Tech-Progress.org stated, “The Constitution says judges ‘shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,’ so speaking of impeachment is the way to assert that using partisan judicial power to undermine health care for our nation is not proper behavior for unelected judges.”

I also agree with Newman when he says, “When Earl Warren led the Court in its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, he made sure it was a 9-0 unanimous decision to make clear that such an extraordinary intervention into democratic governance reflected a nearly universal consensus in the legal world. The current Roberts Court, on the other hand, regularly hands down anti-democratic decisions based on 5-4 partisan divides, undermining any credibility that the Court speaks for beliefs with any partisan difference from other political branches.”

Benjamin Franklin, emerging from Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation for the Constitution, said they had given us “a Republic, if you can keep it.” As that statement acknowledged, it is not easy to keep a democratic republic such as ours from being tainted or contaminated by forces that would profit from weakening it, and this Court is helping those forces. When it comes down to it, they are risking the entire American experiment in democracy to satisfy their twisted beliefs.

If nothing else, perhaps a serious national debate on impeachment could at least make them think twice about what they are doing.

James Israel
Social media
Share
Share