LIGHTS GOING OUT IN AMERICA?

We seem to have entered a time where the lights are going out in America.  They already are in my state of North Carolina with our HB-2 legislation where transgender people must go to the bathroom of their birth.  so far as I know, I have never met a transgender person,r in a bathroom, locker room, or elsewhere.  I have even been places with unisex bathrooms where men an women do their thing in the same bathroom together.  Though at first I felt uncomfortable, I quickly got used to it.  I mean you can go into stalls and close the door can't you?

I'm not sure when it started.  Maybe with the Supreme Court decision of Citizen's United where it was ruled that companies are people.  Chairmen of the Board and CEOs  (usually the same person) not only could make their personal contributions to politics but that of their companies as well and didn't even have to tell their stock holders (allegedly the owners) what they were doing.  Well maybe some of the major stock holders know.

But is was clear when the Supreme Court ruled that owners of a privately-held company could pick and choose what parts of a law they wouldn't obey based on their religious beliefs - the Hobby Lobby Case.  In the case in question it was including contraceptives in health insurance under the ACA health law.  It was clear that the division between church and state was over.

Mind you, there was already an exemption for religious organizations to comply with the contraceptive issue for their own employees.  The problem was that the Federal government would take care of the matter so that the company could be guilt free, but The Little Sister's of The Poor weren't satisfied and sued the government.  The Supreme Court ruling was that the two sides should work out something.

Now our President has sided with the Little Sister's Of The Poor and religious groups won't have to comply with the law.  In theory of course, you don't have to work for religious organizations like the privately held Hobby Lobby or the Little Sister's Of The Poor and about 200 other religious organizations.  So now, the president, not surprisingly, is allowing all lawsuits claiming they should not have to obey the contraceptive provision of the ACA because of the religious beliefs avoid any Federal workaround.

Weirdness over contraceptives has been around for some time.  The paleo-religious have even invented the view that a fertilized human egg deserves personhood and doing anything that might not bring this personhood to birth should be against the law.   Notice that the definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg  has attached to the womb wall.  This procedure can take days, even a week or more so there are plenty of opportunities for something to happen to prevent the pregnancy.  A woman could pass the egg, for example.  I have not found any studies on this, admittedly they would be difficult, but I suspect this is what happens in most cases.  But there are drugs a woman can take to ensure that the fertilized egg does not adhere to the womb wall such as the Morning After pill.  This is what the paleo-religious are after.

So what does this mean?  Do women have to collect any passed eggs to see if they are fertilized and if they are to name them and give them a proper burial?  Our Vice-President was after something like this with aborted fetuses, i.e. that the must be given a proper burial by law.

Where all this will end up, I don't know.  Still, we are a long way from ISUS that would throw gay men off a building top and murder fornicators.  I believe in the early days of our country, there were laws that you had to go to church and there were people there to ensure you didn't go to sleep.  There is the statement, "There is freedom of religion, not freedom from religion."  Of course there is an exception to this for Muslims in America.  Will they be required to convert to Christianity.  If they refuse, what happens?  And what happens to Jews?

As for Gays, there are Evangelicals who will quote you verses in the Bible that say we should kill homosexuals.  The "liberal" Evangelicals say "Not yet, they should be first be given a choice to recant."  As if they can.

How far will this develop?  We have a political party where all their Representative, Senators and, even, the President oppose abortion - 100%.  They could have passed a law without Democrats that removed the contraceptive provision from the ACA.  Why didn't they? Why did they rely on the Supreme Court for this legislation?