Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling, announced Monday, that craft chain Hobby Lobby and other "closely held" for-profit companies can deny birth control coverage to their employees if doing so violates their religious beliefs, Yahoo News reported.
"I disagree with the reasoning as well as the conclusion," Clinton said during a Facebook Live interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. "I find it deeply disturbing we are going in that direction."
The verdict, the first to uphold a religious freedom right of a for-profit corporation, means that thousands of the company's female employees will not have access through their insurance to intrauterine devices and other forms of contraception their bosses object to.
Clinton said she found the implication that "a closely held corporation has the rights of a person when it comes to religious freedom" to be "deeply disturbing." "It's troubling a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception - which is pretty expensive - is not going to get that service through her employer's health care plan because her employer doesn't think she should be using contraception," Clinton said.
As a result of Monday's decision, she predicted that some businesses would lie about religion just to avoid higher costs. "I think there should be a real outcry against this kind of decision," she said. "Many more companies will claim religious beliefs and some will be sincere, but others maybe not. And we're going to see this one insurable service cut out from many, many women. This is a really bad, slippery slope."
Clinton also discussed how her tenure as secretary of state focused on making women and girls a priority, especially since she routinely witnesses the rights of women around the world get violated. "Among those rights is control of their bodies," she said. "It is a disturbing trend that you see in a lot of societies that are unstable, anti-democratic and, frankly, prone to extremism, where women's bodies are used as the defining and unifying issue to bring together people - men - to get them to behave in ways that are disadvantageous to women but prop up rulers."
Monday's ruling, Clinton said, "raises serious questions" about how far women's rights have come in the United States - and how far they still have to go. "Look, we're always going to argue about abortion," Clinton added. "It's a hard choice, and it's controversial, and that's why I am pro-choice, because I want people to be able to make their own choices."
