Tag Archives: lesbian

Lesbian farmers are taking over the country, if you believe Rush Limbaugh

by MargretO76 Posted on August 24, 2016

Queer Eye For The Farm Guy

Lesbian farmers are taking over the country, if you believe Rush Limbaugh

By on Aug 24, 2016Share

Fast-forward with me to the year 2024. Food is plentiful and no one goes hungry — but our society has gone horribly, terribly wrong.

After eight years under Obama and eight more under Clinton, there are hardly any straight white male farmers left. They’ve all moved on to other professions — Birkenstock cobbling, softball coaching, drilling those dimples in golf balls. These are the industries pre-ordained by our lesbian agricultural overlords.

First, they came for farming. Fishing? The lesbians took that, too. Men got to keep hunting, but they’re forced to plant a row of organic kale every time they kill an animal.

Welcome to Rush Limbaugh’s lesbian farmer fever dream.

The frothy-mouthed radio personality painted a similarly dystopian picture on his show last week. Limbaugh’s theory that the Obama administration is giving money to lesbians to become farmers and take over rural America is just the deranged result of his brain processing last week’s Iowa LGBT Rural Summit. In his own words:

So here comes the Obama Regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up. I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Plenty of LGBTQ people already live and work in rural America — almost 10 percent of all same-sex couples in the country, according to the Williams Institute.

But since rural America is not known for having the clearest idea of queer lifestyles — as demonstrated by Limbaugh’s ramblings — a reasonable person would conclude that the purpose of the conference is simply for LGBTQ farmers to have a forum in which to offer support for each other.

Reason? Not a strong suit for Limbaugh.

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Lesbian farmers are taking over the country, if you believe Rush Limbaugh

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The Despicable Way That Insurance Companies Screw Over Lesbians

by ZacCissell Posted on August 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, four lesbian women in New Jersey sued the state after being denied insurance coverage for infertility treatments because they couldn’t prove they had tried to conceive naturally.

A New Jersey law from 2001 requires that insurance companies cover infertility treatment as well as in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technology (ART). But there’s a catch: The patient must prove that her infertility has extended for up to “two years of unprotected sexual intercourse.” Since that law was enacted, though, two important things happened. The Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal, and Obamacare prohibited insurance policies from discriminating again patients based on their sexual orientation. In the first lawsuit of its kind since marriage equality and the passage of Obamacare, the New Jersey women are arguing that the law discriminates against same-sex couples because they obviously can’t get pregnant through unprotected sex with their partners.

“These women are already going through what can be a difficult experience, and they have the added stress of affording it financially and the added insult of being treated like a second-class citizen,” Grace Cretcher, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, told the New York Times. “The specific wording of the New Jersey mandate is particularly egregious and one of the most specific and exclusionary.”

Despite progress on a national level, the New Jersey couples’ experiences might not be unusual. Only 14 states require that insurance companies have at least one plan that covers infertility treatments, which can include intra-uterine insemination, drug therapies, and IVF. But many of them use language similar to the New Jersey law and define infertility as the inability to become pregnant after a certain period of unprotected sex, as opposed to only a medical diagnosis indicating infertility or sexual orientation that excludes intercourse. Even in states like California where laws have been updated to protect insurance discrimination against LGBT people, not all policies are in compliance, according to Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. As a result, same-sex couples no matter what their medical circumstances may be, are often told they don’t qualify for coverage.

In the 36 states that don’t have laws related to fertility coverage, insurance policies can enforce provisions that effectively exclude same-sex couples. Minter says that even though many of those policies cover infertility treatments, many also require heterosexual sex as evidence. Sometimes, plans will allow patients to prove their infertility through failed artificial insemination, but that’s expensive: One cycle of IVF can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and cheaper methods still range from the hundreds to thousands.

The insurance company involved in the New Jersey case told the New York Times that it covers “infertility services equally, regardless of sexual orientation,” and that it interpreted the law “in a gender- and orientation-neutral manner.” It added that “our coverage standard complies with federal nondiscrimination requirements.”

LGBT rights advocates also say the fact that cases like the one in New Jersey are gaining traction shows some movement toward the ultimate goal: protecting the insurance coverage rights of same-sex couples who want to have biological children regardless of their medical circumstances, because ART is their only option.

“If you have a policy that on its face requires a certain kind of sexual intercourse in order to demonstrate infertility, I would argue that’s discrimination,” Minter says. And because of the barriers to pregnancy that same-sex couples face, assisted reproductive technology is an important option. “It’s a very, very common situation.”

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The Despicable Way That Insurance Companies Screw Over Lesbians

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How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

by AidenLoche Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s one more reason to worry about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed the arts and crafts chain to block insurance coverage of contraception for female employees because of the owners’ religious objections: It could screw up corporate law.

This gets complicated, but bear with us. Basically, what you need to know is that if you and some friends start a company that makes a lot of money, you’ll be rich, but if it incurs a lot of debt and fails, you won’t be left to pay its bills. The Supreme Court affirmed this arrangement in a 2001 case, Cedric Kushner Promotions vs. Don King:

linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different “persons,” even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. After all, incorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs.

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.


Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers


The 8 Best Lines From Ginsburg’s Dissent


Why the Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore


How Obama Can Make Sure Hobby Lobby’s Female Employees Are Covered


Hobby Lobby Funded Disgraced Fundamentalist Christian Leader Accused of Harassing Dozens of Women

That separation is what legal and business scholars call the “corporate veil,” and it’s fundamental to the entire operation. Now, thanks to the Hobby Lobby case, it’s in question. By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.

“If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?” Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.

That’s a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby’s argument and hold the veil in place. Here’s what they argued:

Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.

In his opinion for Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito’s insisted the decision should be narrowly applied to the peculiarities of the case. But as my colleague Pat Caldwell writes, the logic of the argument is likely to invite a tide of new lawsuits, all with their own unintended consequences.

Small wonder, then, that despite congressional Republicans defending the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for American business against the nanny state, the US Chamber of Commerce—the country’s main big business lobby—was quiet on the issue. Even more telling: Despite a record tide of friends-of-the-court briefs, not one Fortune 500 weighed in on the case. In fact, as David H. Gans at Slate pointed out in March, about the only sizeable business-friendly groups that did file briefs with the court were the US Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Both sided against Hobby Lobby.

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How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation

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