The Supreme Court has just released its newest book, a 500 page booklet that details the latest news in Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case is particularly interesting. However, the book isn’t about the Hobby Lobby case as much as it is about the Supreme Court deciding cases.
The Supreme Court decides cases almost every day. If you scroll down a bit in the book, you’ll see that there are a lot of rulings in recent years that have made it to the Supreme Court. For example, the court has ruled 5-4 that marriage is a fundamental right and 2-2 that the right to choose your own religion is protected by the first amendment. All of these opinions will be considered as the court holds in a decision. Sometimes they don’t.
The courts are not a perfect place to try and predict what the Supreme Court will decide. In fact, you can’t know what they will do until they rule. Their rulings are based on the facts of the case and the arguments presented to them. But for the most part, the justices are fairly conservative. The last time there was a tie, it was over the question of whether or not the Constitution protects the right to abortion.
The question that is sure to be addressed by the court is whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment protects women from discrimination. If so, the court could potentially rule that women are protected as long as the state’s laws are not designed to discriminate based on their gender. In other words, if the state can only discriminate against women but not against men, then the law can still be violated. On the other hand, if the state can discriminate against both genders, then men and women are treated equal.
For years, we’ve been using the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the federal government can’t discriminate against women. The court has been mostly ignoring this argument, citing instead the Supreme Court’s decision in _Roe v. Wade_, which ruled that a woman’s right to an abortion was not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The court’s decision in _Roe_ was basically a rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
We believe that the courts decision in _Roe_ is a mistake, because it would mean that all abortions of all women, regardless of the reason and the age of the woman, would be illegal. In fact, the Supreme Court has said that women have the right to an abortion no matter their age, and that the government cannot force women to carry an abortion out themselves.
I know some of you are probably like, “Wait, how come the court thought that abortion was legal when it decided the _Roe_ case?” and I’m like, “I don’t know. I have no idea. I just know that the government could not force women to carry out abortions themselves.
The ruling is a legal precedent that will likely be followed in the future, and the Supreme Court also held that laws prohibiting abortions in cases where a woman’s health may be at risk will probably be unconstitutional. So you have to wonder what the court is doing with these comments. I’m sure there must be a good reason.
This isn’t the first time the court has issued a ruling that will affect women’s ability to use the law to get abortion’s illegal. The _Gideon_ case was another one in which the court decided the constitutionality of laws prohibiting abortion if the woman’s health was at risk. The court’s _Gideon_ ruling was a major victory for women and a major setback for the GOP.
But the court also issued a ruling last year that was the opposite of a big win for women and a big setback for the GOP. The court ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. This ruling was a major victory for the GOP, which had been arguing that the law was unconstitutional because it was a violation of the equal rights of gay couples.