Washington state Democrats plan on introducing legislation next year that will counteract the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, which allowed some employers to opt out of providing contraception coverage for employees.
Senate Democrats on Thursday said that the legislation would ensure that all women have access to health insurance with birth control coverage, the News Tribune reported.
The measure would make sure “barrier-free access to birth control remains a fundamental right,” according to a statement from the group of lawmakers. A group of state senators, along with Gov. Jay Inslee (D) announced support for the measure.
Sen. Karen Keiser (D) said that the bill would make clear that the Hobby Lobby ruling violates the state’s anti-discrimination law.
“We’re not really addressing the insurance issue in this, but we are addressing the issue of discrimination against women,” Keiser said, according to the News Tribune. “The Hobby Lobby decision affects one class of people, one group, and all of them have female as their gender.”
In the Thursday statement, Democrats said that they would need to gain control of the state senate in order to pass the bill and warned that if Republicans win the majority, “it is unlikely that any progress on ensuring individual reproductive choices will be achieved.”
This is what should happen. People tend to depend on Washington. If more people were active in voting in all state elections, the right would be relegated to the old Confederate states.
the only problem is that the law will eventually end up being challenged. it will eventually end up in the supreme court, which will, by a 5-4 majority, decide that it’s ok to discriminate an entire class, so long as it’s the “right” class being discriminated against.
one of the 5 has to go, before the court entirely shreds its credibility as a disinterested trier of facts and interpreter of the constitution.
State governments and ideally progressive ones will have to take the reins and get things done, minimum wage, reproductive rights, etc., because it’s evident all the lardasses in D.C. want to do is retain the title in front of their names. It’s ironic to say the least that the party that got so much done under Lincoln including the first income tax, the Homestead Act and land grant universities now languishes in a permanent lethargy.
Well there’s an interesting Supremacy Clause question I couldn’t begin to have an opinion on without doing actual legal research . . .
Right. Without doing research myself, I would guess that Hobby Lobby’s “right” to discriminate on the basis of its (federal) constitutional right to freely exercise its religion would trump its employees’ rights under their state constitution. Of course, the whole idea of corporations having a religion is ridiculous.