Why the Supreme Court's Ruling About Hobby Lobby Scares the Shit Out of Me

This is sort of old news by now, but in the days following the Supreme Court's ruling, thinking about it made me too sick to my stomach to form coherent, blog-worthy thoughts.  It's taken a while for all of it to really sink in, for my impulsive anger to reside enough that I could explain in plain English why exactly this ruling is so fucking terrifying. 

So in case you've been under a rock, here's the deal.  Under the Affordable Care Act, employers are required to offer insurance coverage to their employees.  That coverage has to meet certain basic guidelines to ensure that everyone gets the same quality of coverage.  And part of what's covered by that insurance mandate is several forms of birth control, including Plan B, Ella and two types of IUD.  With me so far? 

Okay.  So Hobby Lobby -- a store founded on Christian values -- objected to being forced to pay for this coverage because these forms of birth control violate their pro-life stance.  To clarify, the contraceptives covered by ACA insurance are not abortion pills, by the medical definition of abortion.  An abortion is medically defined as the destruction of a fertilized egg that has already attached to the uterine wall.  None of the birth control methods mentioned above do that.  Instead, in some way or another, all of them prevent eggs from being fertilized in the first place, or prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. 

All the same, the Supreme Court ruled that it was against the law to require businesses to offer contraceptive coverage that went against the owner's religious beliefs. 

As you might expect, a lot of people have a lot of opinions about this, on all sides -- questions about religious freedom, reproductive rights, and whether your employer should have a say in your healthcare.  I'm not going to get into that here, because I think there's a bigger issue that we need to examine.  Because I don't think this case was about religion at all. 

Corporations Are Not People

....but the Supreme Court seems to think they are. 

Thanks to Corporate Personhood, businesses have the same rights as individuals.  And apparently, if the precedent set by this most recent landmark case is anything to go off of, a corporation's rights can supersede the rights of its employees. 

Make no mistake.  Hobby Lobby doesn't give a shit about birth control.  If it did, it would not have invested so much of its money into the pharmaceutical companies that create the very products it refuses to cover through insurance.  The issue isn't about the corporation's values -- it's an issue of money, power and control. 

Granting corporations so many rights is dangerous, in part because corporations have a whole lot more power than individuals.  Part of the reason that individuals have rights in the first place is to protect the weak from the strong.  Without some sort of protection, there is nothing to stop those with power and authority from enslaving or otherwise abusing those who can't fight back. 

Corporations have more money than individuals.  They have more power.  And thanks to the Super-Pacs, they have immense political pull. 

Ushering in a New Age of Feudalism

Wealth inequality is a major problem in our country.  Today, I read a brilliant blog post from "ultra-rich man" Nick Hanauer that said exactly what I've been thinking for years:  If we don't do something to stop it, we will enter another feudal era. 



If you're not familiar with feudalism, here's the way it's basically laid out: At the top, you have a monarch.  Below him are a cluster of noblemen.  These people would be granted ownership of land within the kingdom, in exchange for them providing soldiers to the king's army.  The lands owned by the noblemen would be populated by nobles and knights, certainly, but there'd be a much higher percentage of peasants.  These peasants would live on these lands, but they would have no rights to them.  They would grow crops, but most of what they grew would be the property of the nobleman whose lands they tilled.  There was no upward mobility.  There was only long, arduous hours of back-breaking labor in exchange for a subsistence lifestyle and the persistent threat of abuse from noblemen. 

It seems to me that corporations are the new noblemen.  They're the Lords and Ladies of the modern age.  

The so-called "working poor" (which, in these times of the vanishing middle class, means most of us) are share-croppers, peasants tilling the land of the big corporations.  Except instead of growing sheep and turnips, we're growing cash.  We keep just enough of it to survive, and the rest goes up to those landowners -- who in turn give some of their money to the government in exchange for the freedom to keep doing what they're doing. 

Think on it.  Read Nick Hanauer's article.  Consider it long and hard and tell me honestly if that's a reality you want to see come to pass.  If not, you and I and everyone else needs to start making some noise.  We need to become champions for our own rights while we still have the chance, before things get nasty enough for a full-blown revolution.

The Privilege of Frugality

For many years, I've been involved in rat rescue.  Once, I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow rat-enthusiast (a rare event) and we had a long talk about our rodent friends and how much we loved them, what it was that made them so special.

My new friend made a point that I had never considered:  "Rats are just such a bourgeois pet.  In other places in the world, people have to try hard to keep rats out of their homes.  It's a matter of survival.  Here, we're so far removed from that, we can actually keep them as pets.  We can afford to feed and love and cherish something that other people are threatened by."

That stuck with me.  He's right, of course: Keeping rats is the epitome of privilege.

And, in many ways, frugality is also a position of privilege.  

What is Privilege, Anyway?

Privilege is a term that gets used frequently in discussions of race and gender, but it's not limited to those spheres at all.  Privilege is something all of us have, and all of us need to be aware of.  Essentially, privilege is something that you have that makes certain things easier for you than others who do not have it.  If you are privileged, you're operating on "easy mode," while people without those same privileges are operating on a harder setting.

There are several privileges that can make it easier to live frugally:

• Having some extra money in the bank so you can do things like stock up in bulk when you find a good sale. 
• Experience with handling money, such as learning money management skills from your parents.  
• A working spouse with a good enough job to enable the other person to stay home and home-make. 
• Good health, enabling you to complete projects around the home or simply avoid spending so much on medical bills. 
• Access to resources that can teach you new skills -- the internet, library books, community classes.  
• The space to grow your own food. 
• For that matter, the space to store and cook meals at home, and the knowledge of how to do that.  

In a lot of cases, these are things that can be learned -- and that's one of the things I hope I can achieve through blogging, is helping people learn some of this stuff so we're all on even footing.  In other cases, they're situational problems: You have to solve something else before talking about it is even an option.  If you're living in your car, it's not going to do you a bit of good to learn about how to can tomatoes.  You've got a bigger issue to deal with.  Once you find a way out of your crisis, then you can get up to the next step. 

Owning Your Privilege

Privilege isn't something you need to be ashamed of or guilty about.  It's not something you need to apologize for.  Often, it's something you have no control over -- your gender, the part of the world you were born in, the socioeconomic status of your parents.

But it is something you need to be aware of, and it's something that you need to realize not everyone shares.  That's the crucial part: You cannot dismiss people who do not share your privilege as being "stupid" or "lazy" or "unworthy" because they are working with a different set of skills than you are. 

What you can do is listen to people who have different experiences, and try to appreciate where they're coming from.  And you can use your privilege to help make things easier for others -- whether that means teaching someone a skill that you have, or participating in a grass roots program to make changes to your community. 

We all have voices.  They all deserve to be heard.  And flaunting your privilege silences the voices of the people around you.  So next time you start to lose patience with the way someone else lives, or the questions they ask, or the mistakes they make, try to take a step back and remember that they might not have what you do.  Instead of degrading them, listen to them -- and then think about what you can do to make the world a better place for people like them. 

Unfuck Your Habitat: A Glimpse at Poverty and Squalor (and what we can do about it)

Today on Facebook I happened to find a shocking and sad gallery -- Google street view photos of Detroit, showing its descent into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. 

It got me thinking again about a question I've always wondered:  Just why is it that poverty and squalor seem to go hand-in-hand?  Why is it that a low income leads so inevitably to deplorable living conditions in terms of sanitation?  On the surface, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense: Why would being poor make it harder to clean your house? 

But the connection is certainly there, so much so that it's intuitive: When we see a run-down neighborhood, we immediately associate it with poverty.  We have a strong association in our minds between "poor" and "dirty," and I think that's one reason why there's such an instinctive reaction of disgust or disdain toward people living in or near poverty.  There's a huge stigma, an oroboros of filth: We're afraid of being perceived as poor, in case people think that we're dirty, and we're loathe to be seen dirty, in case people think we might be poor.  

So what's the deal?  

Squalor and poverty collide for a number of reasons.  Like most things in life, it's not really simple:

• Poor people can't afford nice things, and they can't afford to replace what they have when it breaks.  Stained clothing, broken-down cars, household damage etc.  
• Poverty quite often coincides with mental illness.  Perhaps being poor has led to depression, or maybe mental illness has made it impossible to find work.  In any case, people who are struggling with mental illness might have a hard time maintaining their homes.  
• Similarly, many of the nation's poor are elderly or physically disabled.  These people are not physically able to maintain their homes and can't hire someone else to come in and do it for them.  
• The "working poor" are probably too busy handling multiple jobs to spend a whole lot of time maintaining their homes.  And if they have small children and/or pets, those homes can get messy quickly.  
• Poverty and substance abuse sometimes intersect, for various reasons that deserve a post of their own.  Like mental illness, drug use can inhibit your ability and desire to maintain a home.  It also tends to be a social type of lifestyle, so the user might have frequent "guests" coming and creating a mess as well.  
• There's a lack of infrastructure in truly impoverished areas.  Things like trash pickup and sewer line maintenance tend to require the help of a municipal service.  If that doesn't exist for some reason -- lack of funding, extremely rural location -- then the task may not be completed. 

Regardless of how the mess came to exist, once it gets set, it's easy for it to snowball.  And thanks to our cultural perceptions of wealth and filth, it can be extremely difficult to get out of this position: You feel ashamed, which leads to depression, which makes it hard to get out of bed, much less tackle an ever-growing mountain of filth.

What if it's YOUR House? 

Thanks to all the baggage associated with it, most of us without much money don't want to admit to being poor, and we definitely don't want to admit to being dirty.  But the fact is, sometimes you look at your kitchen and realize that you have a towering pile of dishes, or trash that hasn't been taken out, or that your puppy shredded a role of toilet paper all over the hallway and you haven't had the heart or the energy to deal with any of it.

Maybe you even have a mean little voice in the back of your mind saying You are poor and live in squalor.  That's just who you are now.  

And so maybe you believe that voice, and maybe you get overwhelmed, and maybe you put off the hard work because it's exhausting and depressing and your life is already really hard.  

Fortunately, there are a few resources to help people who have slipped into this position, providing actual solutions without judging you for them.  One of these, a project I really appreciate and respect, is Unfuck Your Habitat (UFYH).  The thing I love about UFYH is that they're totally non-judgmental and recognize that people are coming from different backgrounds or might have different limitations.  Yes, it's a little vulgar and irreverent (two things I happen to appreciate, but your mileage may vary), but it's also got some very solid advice.

Here's their mission statement:

And our homes aren’t the only things that need to be unfucked. Our finances, our jobs, our relationships: there’s no end to the things we can fuck up. The important thing to remember is that there is nothing that can’t be unfucked. You just have to do it.

No, I'm not being paid by these guys to write about it.  I just genuinely think it's a cool resource.

If UFYH is a little much for you, you can also check out The Flylady, who's also very practical but a lot more "domestic" and traditional.  Either way, the great thing about these sites is that they offer you some practical steps for dealing with the mess and finding your way out of it.

Part of owning your income -- even when it's minimal -- is being proud of what you have.  You might not have much, but if you learn to take care of it, people will treat you differently and you will feel differently about yourself. 

As you learn new domestic skills (making your own cleaning solutions, minimizing your possessions, composting your trash and reducing your waste), you'll find your home easier to maintain.  But right now, today, if you're standing at ground zero -- don't let the shame take over.  Take a deep breath, and make a plan, and decide once and for all that being poor doesn't mean you have to be dirty.