“As the kids say, it is time for the Court to stfu,” Judge Richard George Kopf declared after the Supreme Court ruled on the Hobby Lobby case, slamming the Court’s ruling on his personal blog.
Kopf, a George H.W. Bush appointee, linked to a Urban Dictionary entry on stfu which defined it as an “acronym used for the phrase ‘shut the f–k up’ for efficiency reasons.”
Kopf declined by email to chat with msnbc about the post, but his office confirmed that the blog is indeed his.
“In the Hobby Lobby cases, five male Justices of the Supreme Court, who are all members of the Catholic faith and who each were appointed by a President who hailed from the Republican party, decided that a huge corporation, with thousands of employees and gargantuan revenues, was a ‘person’ entitled to assert a religious objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate because that corporation was ‘closely held’ by family members,” the judge wrote in a blog post first flagged by Think Progress. “To the average person, the result looks stupid and smells worse.”
Kopf went on to say the ruling looks “misogynist,” “partisan” and “religiously motivated,” and wrote that the highest Court should have declined to rule.
“Had the Court sat on the sidelines, I don’t think any significant harm would have occurred. The most likely result is that one or more of the political branches of government would have worked something out,” he concluded. “Or not.”
The Supreme Court handed down a ruling siding with Hobby Lobby, a chain of retail arts and crafts stores, which objected to Affordable Care Act provisions that said they had to provide insurance coverage for birth control. The decision prompted Justice Ruth Bader Gingsburg to write a stinging dissent.
“The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would … deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage,” she wrote. “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”
Jane Timm