the latest rounds of Supreme Court decisions (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and McCullen v. Coakley) are continuations of this Court's predilection for siding with corporate persons over natural persons, particularly when those natural persons are of the female gender.

first, we have a decision which says that religious nut jobs have more right to yell at, and harass, women who seek an abortion or other procedures at an abortion-providing facility than those women have the right to seek a medical procedure/advice without fear of being harassed or threatened. the Court enjoys an over 200-foot protest-free zone outside its own halls for precisely the same reason that the 35-foot buffer zone was created around abortion clinics. it is to protect the people who come and go from harassment by people of opposite ideology. this is doubly true in the case of abortion clinics due to the history of violence and death the religious right brought to the table. the big shocker in the McCullen case was that the Court's women sided with the majority that free speech rights trump women's public safety. i guess the takeaway here is that as long as women continue to bear children, they can expect that their rights are diminished in comparison to non-child bearing speakers. or, alternatively, women should just do whatever they are told and like it, because the Court has determined that others' religious expression is more important than a woman's self-determination of her own medical decisions.

as a counter-measure, i would encourage anyone reading to enter the Supreme Court's buffer zone in Washington DC to protest any and all decisions the Court makes, since it has now been declared unconstitutional to prevent people from gathering in a public space for the right to protest something, as long as they do it peacefully, under the guise of "counseling" or "outreach".

yesterday's decision allowing for-profit corporations to have religious beliefs follows the same reasoning that religious expression is more important than science and medicine, including public safety and health. we also were treated to the fallacy that it's possible for a corporate entity to have religious beliefs.

as an aside, i can't wait for the first corporate conversion to Islam, the way a lot of the black athletes in the 1970s converted to Islam. because the subtext of the decision yesterday is that white, conservative Christians have more rights than anyone else in the US. not only that, but this ruling also establishes that it's perfectly legal to skirt the law if you can prove that your company has a strong moral belief which prevents you from following it, as long as that strong moral belief does not involve discrimination based on the various social markers we have determined it's illegal to discriminate against. and all of this was made possible because a group of old white men get icky inside when women's reproductive health is concerned.

a side product of the Sebelius ruling is also that your employer can now dictate the type of health coverage you are going to have, but only if you're a woman. the irony here is that, as a corporation, Hobby Lobby has investments in several pharmaceutical companies which make the very birth control products they supposedly "deeply morally object" to (http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/01/investing/hobby-lobby-401k-contraception/). if this is such a deep moral conviction on the company's part, you'd think they would have divested from these funds a long time ago. apparently, it's only morally objectionable to be asked to invest in insurance plans which cover those drugs, not the makers of those drugs themselves. which begs the question: how does their retirement plan earn more money if they refuse to allow their money to be spent using those drugs they are invested in?

so, all in all, a good couple of decisions if you are white, and Christian, and male in America. for the rest of us, we have to hope that the Court will one day side with the actual Constitution of the US and not just with the special interests who want to deny rights to people based on their non-participation in an arbitrary code of ethics written several thousand years ago. separation of Church and State is part of the founding of our country, but apparently only non-Christian churches are forced to be separate from State.