Hobby Lobby triumphant and other links

By this time you’ve probably heard that Hobby Lobby won its Supreme Court case (and I notice from the old link that Dahlia Lithwick predicted the vote breakdown). The significant points being, according to Samuel Alito (writing the majority opinion) it doesn’t matter whether IUDs and other birth control are actually abortifacents as long as Hobby Lobby sincerely believes they are; the government can and should work around this by paying for birth control directly; the ruling only applies to “closely held corporations”; and this ruling only applies to religious objections to contraception and specifically isn’t granting the same right to people who object to vaccination, blood transfusions or other medical treatments.
As noted in this linkpost, Lithwick’s discussion, Daily Beast and Slate, closely-held corporations employ around 60 million people so this could affect millions. And it’s entirely possible that Ruth Bader Ginsberg is right in her dissent: Alito can assert this is narrowly tailored as much as he wants, but he doesn’t really offer a logical reason it can’t apply elsewhere. And while he also says flat-out it can’t be used to justify racial discrimination, he pointedly doesn’t bring up discriminating against women or gays (you know, the unserious kind of discrimination).
So very sexist, and potentially worse is in the wings. In other news …

Meriam Ibrahim of Sudan was condemned to death for being Christian when her father was Muslim. At Slacktivist, Fred Clark points out not only are laws that cripple religious freedom this way wrong, they’re bad for the faith they’re supposedly protecting: If everyone’s forced to stay in Islam by law, are they truly faithful?

•The Prime Minister of Morocco sounds a lot like an American conservative in insisting the world is better off if women stay at home. Echidne looks at his speech here.

•The Supreme Court shoots down Massachusetts’ buffer zone around abortion clinics.

•LGM justifiably mocks a pundit who finds a new reason to object to minimum-wage increases, taxes on high earners and protecting the environment—those ideas are from the sixties! How dated! The Republicans are the ones with fresh ideas! Which is a fair point, if you ignore political paranoia about the UN that I was reading as a tween (that’s a looooong time ago) and an enthusiasm for 1800s economics and women staying home. Yes, all that stuff is very fresh.

•And to prove that having new ideas isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, we have Kevin Williamson arguing that if the Affordable Care Act can make people replace bad health insurance with better policies, why can’t the government force everyone in shitty towns to move to San Francisco?

•Rape apologist Rod Dreher is shocked, shocked and appalled that “Vice President Joe Biden declared Tuesday that protecting gay rights is a defining mark of a civilized nation and must trump national cultures and social traditions,” adding that “The mark of a civilized nation. Well. Let it be noted that as far as the Obama administration is concerned, traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are vestiges of barbarism.”
Actually, no. The White House didn’t say “silencing people who condemn gays,” it said “protecting gay rights” (Dreher makes it clear he doesn’t see a difference). Sounds fair to me. And it’s not as if “Christianity” as a body condemns gays—plenty of churches and individual Christians support gay rights (I assume the same is true of Judaism and Islam, but I don’t know).
And frankly this sounds way too close to the logic used in defense of slavery and segregation: It’s our culture, it’s our tradition, are you saying we’re uncivilized, that’s a slur on my honor!

•At least one VP at General Motors may have known about the Chevy Cobalt’s defective ignition switches (they can turn off when you don’t want them to) nine years ago.

•A company with an app that lets drivers auction off parking (you’re ready to pull out, see what someone will pay you to wait until they get there) says it will fight San Francisco, which has told the company it can’t make a profit off public parking.

•The new Six Strikes copyright-protection system is supposed to reduce lawsuits and the threat of them. Some copyright trolls apparently hope to use it to find more people to see.