Freedom of Religion for Corporations? Don't Laugh. Turning of the Screw.

The same, blatantly corporatist US Supreme Court that vested corporations with political rights is expected to next give them religious freedoms.

Corporations, of course, worship only the God of Profit and Sodom, but they can use notional religious freedoms to deny employees benefits like coverage for birth control.

That may sound crazy but some court watchers  believe that the Right-Wing Five will follow the logic of their “corporations-are-people” theories to this next nutty conclusion. After all, if corporations have First Amendment rights of “free speech” when they are financing political propaganda to influence the outcome of U.S. elections, there is a consistency – albeit a bizarre one – to extending to corporations the First Amendment’s “religious freedom.”

Already unlimited corporate money in campaigns has drowned out regular human citizens in terms of who (or what) has the bigger say in the outcome of elections, so why shouldn’t the religious choices of corporations override the personal and moral judgments of people who work for the corporations?

...whatever the Five do, you can count on them wrapping their reasoning in their claims to be devotees of an “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution or as “strict constructionists.”

The reality, though, is that the Five’s modus operandi is to reach an ideological conclusion about what they want to do based on their political opinions or partisan needs and then find some legal-sounding language to wrap around the ruling.

Some day people need to realize that extending rights to corporations is not a zero-sum game.  Rights given to corporations are rights that citizens are forced to share.   They become diluted rights, ineffective rights, rights lost to the ordinary and diverted to the most affluent.

This is, again, a turning of the screw.