The price of standing up

Last Thursday, I attended my first protest.

You might have heard about it on the news, when several thousand people marched from Union Square to Times Square to protest the police brutality in Ferguson.

Organized by word of mouth and social media, the protest was described as a silent vigil in Union Square. At 7:00 it got of to a confused start: whatever it was, the event wasn't a silent vigil, and the moderately-sized crowd didn't quite seem to know what to do with itself. Most talked and milled around, some stood silently, and a few activists, mostly black, chanted: Hands up, don't shoot and No justice, no peace. I didn't join in; I'm white, and I wasn't sure it was my place. The feeling seemed pretty common among the white attendees; while we definitely wanted to support the activists, we weren't quite sure how to do it.

Then crowd shifted: someone had started moving, and the rest moved to follow. They spread out and sped up, and the activists led their chants like a conductor leads an orchestra, raising them, using their footsteps like a metronome.

For thirty blocks we marched like that, right through traffic down the middle of Broadway all the way to Times Square. We held our arms up until they were sore and shouted until our throats hurt. The white supporters gradually figured out what to do, and started to lead chants when the black activists grew tired.

And people joined.

A lot of people.

Just around dusk, right in the middle of Times Square, next to the bright blue NYPD station, the march ground to a halt.

Turns out the police had blocked us. After about ten few minutes they let us move again, funneling us up to the northern part of Times Square...

...where they blocked us again.

With the march stopped, the chants became quieter. The black activists tried to keep them alive; a few of the white supporters helped out. (I joined in as best I could, but my throat was raw.) But without the movement of marching, the energy wasn't there.





About twenty minutes later, the police let us go, under a few conditions. We had to walk in a narrow line on the sidewalk, head south out of Times Square, then go west. The activists warned that this was a tactic to split us apart; we had to stick together. And we followed them westward, toward Port Authority, the police at our side every step of the way. We walked right down the center of the street, hands up, screaming, then turned a corner...

...right into a wall of police vans.

Once we were bottled up against their blockade, they surrounded us...

...pushed us together, and backed us up against the sidewalk.

Ten minutes later, they hadn't made any indication they intended to let us move. In the crowd, people started passing out a phone number: the National Lawyers' Guild. "Write it on your arm," they said. "If the cops take us in, they'll take everything you have."



I felt exhilarated. I was doing something important! We were making noise, forcing people to pay attention to our outrage with the behavior of the our police. This meant something, and I was proud to be part of it.

Then I looked around.

The black men and women around me were definitely excited, but not exhilarated. They made jokes at the police, they chanted, but they were not exhilarated. You don't feel exhilarated with your life on the line. You feel terrified.

Unlike me, they had something to lose here.

That was the main difference between the white protesters (myself included) and the black ones. For the white protesters, tearing down this vicious and brutal system that supports these racist, overarmed, hyperaggressive police was an important cause, and we were proud to do our part. But what did we have to lose if things went bad? We were white. The police wouldn't really hurt us. We'd get a few bruises, a night in the precinct, a reprimand at most.

For the black protesters, this this was their lives. And to try and raise their head, to stand up and force America to acknowledge them as more than animals, they risked beatings, jail time, and death at the hands of the police. And they still stood up. And more than that, they led others to stand with them.

The police kept us penned in at the side of the street for about half an hour. Toward the end of it, they started making what seemed like random arrests. All were black men. At that point a white protester in the crowd suggested that we provoke the police into arresting us illegally so we could sue.

Nobody said anything to him. The scorn was enough.

It's easy to think of supporting the unprivileged as a game when you have nothing to lose from doing it. White people, straight people, cisgendered men - people like me - who want to do their part have to remember that. Privilege is about not having to worry about things have other people afraid for their lives. When we stand up for those less privileged, we always risk less than they do. Remember that.

Respect that. Respect their wishes. Stand with them when they need you, and support them when they want to stand alone.

Just how bad is the Hobby Lobby decision? Let me count the ways...

In case you missed it, the Supreme Court of the United States of America just ruled that corporations have the right to dictate their employees' healthcare.

Under this ruling, corporations may claim that a medical procedure violates their religious beliefs and deny coverage for that sole reason. While I could go down the line and explain every reason why this ruling is cruel, abhorrent, idiotic, flings open the gates on a dozen slippery slopes, and invites an era of legislative chaos that would ripple through our legal, medical, and economic systems...

No. I'm going to explain them. You've probably seen every argument I present floating around the Internet in some form or another, many of them in a form more thorough, well-argued, and well-supported than I present here. I'm taking the other route. 

I'm going for quantity. 

There's nothing quite like that moment of horror as you see the sheer volume of reasons this ruling is terrible. Nothing quite like the sick feeling moments later as you realize the fractal nature of this case, that each reason encapsulates a hundred other problems that all stink just as badly as the whole.

So sit down and let me tell you how many ways this ruling is terrible.

To start, every single justice who ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby's "right" to not pay its female employees' healthcare costs is a man. This isn't quite as bad as the all-male Congressional panel on abortion of 2012, but it's representative of the same systemic problem. Americans have taken note of the Court's intransigence, and public confidence in it has sunk.

Hobby Lobby displays a history of raging hypocrisy on this case. While they refuse to cover any sort of reproductive care for women, they gladly pay for Viagra and vasectomies. Neither of these have any biological necessity, unlike women's reproductive care. The overall implication is that Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court believe that men's pleasure trumps women's medical needs.

Also, Hobby Lobby is heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies which manufacture contraceptives, which undercuts the chain's claim to a sincere, principled belief that birth control is wrong. According to Hobby Lobby, contraception is wrong, unless it makes money for Hobby Lobby.

Also, it sources many of its goods from China, where forced abortions still happen.

As for the current Supreme Court? Well, the gentlemen who currently warm that bench have written a long and storied history of ignoring petty things like "science" or "evidence" if it would force them to ponder that things such as poverty or discrimination might exist. 

In the mind of this Court, we live in a world of Platonic ideals where worldly evidence need not tread. Arguments which appear plausible within the scope of the Court's white, male, wealthy, geriatric standard of scrutiny fly. Those which don't fall, evidence be damned. No amount of statistics and analysis and experts will ever stack up to the Court's casual observations of fields it doesn't understand, which is why it concluded that the Voting Rights Act is obsolete.

One of those fields, of course, is medicine, where the Court apparently believes employers should have control over its employees' treatments. While this ruling technically doesn't mean employers can dictate what their employees can and can't do with their bodies, due to the lethally high cost of healthcare in the United States, that is the precise result.

What happens if a female employee, denied coverage for contraceptives, can still afford them? Simple: she buys them out of pocket with money from her paycheck. In effect, the corporation is still paying for those contraceptives; it's just through a paycheck instead of an insurance plan. How can an employer dictate what employees can and can't do with one aspect of their compensation, but not another? Employment is not a sponsorship; once pay and benefits are disbursed, an employer has zero say over what the employee does with them. Except...now it does.

But fear not! Justice Alito, writing for the majority, reassures us that the government could just pick up the slack for employers who prefer not to pay for contraception. But then, what's to stop employers forcing taxpayers to subsidize benefits it doesn't care to provide? Would we have to subsidize religious employers who feel that women should be paid less than men? It's a distinct possibility.

Speaking of healthcare, let's talk about abortion. Let's talk about what it isn't. Hobby Lobby's case rested on the belief that contraceptives such as Plan B and IUDs cause abortion, which has this awkward detail of being completely false. Contraceptives are not abortion. Period. They only inhibit conception, just like the name says they do.

Not that the Supreme Court would bother itself with something as silly as verifiable medical fact. In its ruling, the Court concluded that it should privilege Hobby Lobby's false belief that contraceptives cause abortion over the FDA's fact-based definition when deciding the case. There's no real difference between claiming that contraceptives cause abortion and claiming that Tylenol does; both are false. But under this decision, "religious freedom" means you can define anything however you choose if you cover your ears and shout loudly enough.

By letting corporations use religious beliefs to claim exemptions from reality, we grant them a blank check to do whatever they want as long as they wrap it in a veneer of piety. This is quite the dilemma: either the Court can cede that it has given corporations implicit permission to do pretty much anything, or it can pick and choose which religious exemptions are valid and which aren't...which violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

If employers can dictate employees' healthcare under the banner of "freedom of religion", what is to stop them from using that same banner to dictate other behavior as well? As a Jew, could I ban my employees from eating pork? Could a Mormon boss say his employees can't drink? And these are mundane examples; Justice Ginsburg points out some far worse, and more plausible, scenarios. Under this ruling, a corporation could potentially could use its freedom of religion as a mandate to exclude its employees from any type of behavior, on or off the job.

And it's already begun.

The Court must have realized on some level the judicial chaos their ruling would cause, because it added  a few provisions to limit the decision's scope. The problem? Those limitations were little more than an afterthought, and their slapdash wording causes problems of its own.

First, the majority specified that its ruling only applies to closely held (not publicly traded) companies, but were really vague about their reasons for distinguishing the two. Weak reasoning like this leaves cracks in the ruling that a clever plaintiff could use to secure religious exemptions for publicly traded corporations as well.

Second, the Court claims that this ruling does not affect any medical treatments beyond contraception because...it doesn't. Alito doesn't actually provide a reason. He just wants you to take his word for it. And if your Christian Scientist boss refuses to cover your kidney transplant...well, good luck.

Those paltry limitations do little limit this ruling's scope. Beyond the judicial chaos the complexity of this ruling will cause, its sheer impact is vast. Closely-held corporations account for 90% of incorporated U.S. companies, and some of them are huge. What the Supreme Court describes as a narrow ruling is not in fact narrow at all.

EDIT: In fact, the Court has already backed off from those shaky claims of narrowness.

Alito's decision to limit the ruling to closely-held corporations is troubling not just for its content but its inconsistency: it implies that some, but not all, corporations are legally people, depending on certain criteria. This precedent could quite plausibly circle back on the definition of what a "person" is, and makes me dread the day when we decide that some, but not all, humans are legally people. Depending on certain criteria.

It's time to talk about one of the stickiest topics of this whole, sticky mess: the ascendant, toxic idea of corporate personhood. How can a corporation have religion? Does it attend church on Sundays? Does it pray? As an entity convened for the express purpose of profit, we have to assume that profit is always a corporation's Priority One. A corporation is a selfish beast by nature. I won't say that's right or wrong, but it's certainly not religious. For a corporation to claim favorable treatment for its "sincere religious belief" smacks of a really underhanded way to serve its Priority One.

The entire point of incorporation, a centerpiece of capitalism, is to separate person from power. This allows for a personal life separate from work, and also liberalizes capitalist societies in comparison with feudal ones. Under capitalism, the elites have power; under feudalism, the elites are power. If power and person are one, social mobility is unthinkable.

In the Hobby Lobby decision, the Supreme Court has granted that for-profit company, can be said to hold the religious beliefs of those who control it. They have in principle allowed that a corporation, a power structure, may merge with the individuals who control it.

They have in principle allowed a return to feudalism.

That scares me.