Late last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby didn’t have to cover birth control in their insurance plans for their female employees. Hobby Lobby’s insurance plans still cover Viagra and vasectomies. We may think that this doesn’t affect the LGBT community, but it has a direct impact with the female bisexual community, and could potentially lead to bigger law changes that affect the gay community. The Hobby Lobby case serves as a precedent for any religiously-headed company or school that wishes to deny its female employees’ or students’ birth control or Plan B in their insurance plans. This ruling could lead to discrimination in hiring LGBT employees because it is against the owner’s religious beliefs.
Less than 24 hours after the
Supreme Court issued their ruling, a group of religious organizations sent a
letter to President Obama asking to be exempt from a forthcoming executive order
that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT
people. The floodgates are open, and now it’s a mad race to discriminate toward
anyone while the ruling is still fresh.
It is unpleasant to see that
religion, and a company is seen as people higher on the totem pole than women,
and that the LGBT community as a whole is being seen as even less than that. One
thing crossed my mind while researching for this article: birth control is the
first to be nixed, but the next insurance casualty could be hormone therapy and
reconstructive surgeries for the trans* community. If companies began denying
coverage of hormone therapy, they’d be denying the trans* community the basic
human right to be themselves. In the last year our country has taken many steps
to make everything for everyone seem more equal, and now it seems that we are
backtracking. Women were the first to earn their rights, and then movements
started for everyone else. Now the government is helping corporations take away
the right to have birth control through insurance that we pay for.
Health insurance has covered birth
control for quite a while, so why is it suddenly an issue? It’s another form of
a big corporation, and the government telling us what we can do to our bodies
because of religion. There is such a thing as religious freedom, but there
should also be a separation of church and state. More importantly, people should
have say over anything before a corporation, and women should be the ones to
vote on matters pertaining to things such as birth control. Where I come from,
and how I grew up, I learned it’s frowned upon to impose your religious beliefs
onto other people, especially through law.
