I have often said that the Christofascists long to overturn not only Roe v. Wade, but also Griswold v. Connecticut which first laid out a right to privacy and struck down Connecticut's ban on the sale of contraception even to married heterosexual couples. The ruling in Lawrence v. Texas was an extension of the right to privacy in one's intimate relationships first noted in Griswold. The "godly folks" have always had an agenda to force others to live by their hate and fear based religious dogma. While gays are ostensibly the targets of the GOP backed "religious freedom" laws, the real targets are much broader, including women's health care rights. Think Progress looks at this larger agenda. Here are excerpts:
Presidential candidates, the Christian Right, and the entire state of Indiana are still reeling from the fallout over Indiana’s recent attempt to enact a broad “religious freedom” law designed to allow for LGBT discrimination. And despite the national outrage over that law, similar fights are brewing in Arkansas and Louisiana.
Most of the conversation around these state-level policies, which are modeled on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), centers on the legislation’s discriminatory effect on LGBT citizens. Indeed, the people who drafted Indiana’s law were quite specific about the fact that it was intended to allow businesses to refuse service to LGBT individuals based on their sexual orientation.
But, as Dalia Lithwick recently pointed out in Slate, these “religious freedom” arguments are actually rooted in a much older fight that has implications stretching beyond the LGBT community. Over the past several decades, states have quietly been expanding the scope of their religious liberty laws to allow medical professionals to refuse to provide basic health services they oppose on religious grounds. And those services invariably end up falling under the category of reproductive rights, since that particular aspect of women’s medical care often gets caught in the crossfires of religious debates.
[T]hese laws can also inflict serious harm on women by denying them essential health care, such as contraceptive coverage, emergency contraception, sterilization and abortion procedures, and more,” Sally Steenland, the director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, told ThinkProgress.
One recent case in Georgia, in which a woman was unable to receive the medication she needed to treat her miscarriage because of her local pharmacists’ objections to abortion, provides a clear example of what Steenland is referencing.
“A woman who has just learned that she lost her baby shouldn’t have to spend time shopping for a pharmacist who will fill the prescription her doctor has ordered,” Amy Morton, the chairwoman of progressive advocacy organization Better Georgia, told ThinkProgress via email. “There are women all over Georgia — particularly in rural areas — who don’t have the option of going to another pharmacy if their pharmacist refuses to fill a prescription.”
But, thanks to the proliferation of so-called “conscience clauses” that arose in response to Roe v. Wade, that’s perfectly legal in Morton’s state.
[J]ust like how states’ overly broad RFRA laws can be used to allow anti-gay businesses to deny services from LGBT people, this particular interpretation of “religious freedom” can also allow anti-choice doctors and pharmacists to deny services from women. And there’s no question that this framework is being advanced to the detriment of women’s health care access: It was also the argument at the heart of the recent Hobby Lobby case, when the Supreme Court decided that some private companies should be allowed to refuse birth control services to their employees based on their own moral objections to contraception.
RFRA laws’ potential impact on reproductive rights wasn’t a major talking point during the national fight over Indiana’s law. But it’s important to see the issues of LGBT rights and reproductive rights as interconnected . . . “Those asserting claims about same-sex marriage are self-consciously drawing on objections to abortion and contraception as they advance objections to interacting with persons in same-sex relationships,” NeJaimes and Siegel told Slate. “These conscience objections run beyond the wedding industry to implicate a much broader set of goods and services, including healthcare and employment benefits.”
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