It is now 4:30 am Pacific time and 7:30 am Eastern Time in the United States. In just a few hours the Supreme Court of the United States is expected to issue what many consider to be the most important ruling of 2014 for the American people.
The nine justice will decide whether or not religious freedom may be restricted in the name of women's absolute right to contraception and abortion and to force other people to pay for it.
The justices will also decide whether corporations have religious rights or whether freedom of religion applies only to individuals.
These decisions will arrive sometime after 10 am eastern time.
At issue are two companies. One whose owners are practising Christians and another company whose owners are not very religious but are claiming religious freedom just to get out having to pay for extra healthcare for their employees.
One of the companies has claimed that the morning after pill is actually an abortion pill. The pill in question, however, does not kill fetuses, but rather prevents the woman's egg from becoming fertilized. Once the sperm enters the egg, for those of you who are not aware of this, it takes up to 24 hours for it to make it through the egg to center where it has to go before fertilization can even start. The morning after pill prevents this by flushing the egg before fertilization can begin. No fertilization, no fetus, no abortion. To call it an abortion pill is therefore, misleading.
But even that will be minor compared to the question of whether corporations have a right to religious freedom objections to reasonable secular laws. The courts in the United States have never ruled on whether the first amendment religious freedom clause applies to corporations or whether that right can be used to prevent people from exercising their reasonable rights.
What do you think the court will do?
