Democratic Senate Candidate Shenna Bellows Warns Hobby Lobby Ruling Strips Away Legal Protections, Denies Women Reproductive Freedom
Press Release
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Shenna Bellows released the following statement today in response to the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling allowing corporations to claim an exemption from laws to which they object on religious grounds.
"Neither your boss nor the government should interfere in your personal decisions about whether or when to use birth control. Today's horrible Supreme Court decision disregards women's health and opens the door to religious discrimination by employers. We need leadership in Congress who will stand up for reproductive freedom without exceptions."
In 2012, Republican Susan Collins voted in favor of this very outcome when she voted in favor of the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed companies to deny reproductive health care coverage to their employees based on a moral preference.
Sen. Collins also supports a large religious exemption loophole in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which recently passed the Senate. Bellows opposes the loophole and recently proposed a national Human Rights Act, modeled after Maine's, that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT Americans with no exceptions. You can read about that proposal and Bellows' leadership on LGBT issues in her widely read Huffington Post article.
"Religious exemptions -- whether in health care law or anti-discrimination legislation -- are nothing more than an excuse to allow certain people to impose their own moral standards on others and deny freedoms to those who work for them," Bellows said. "Employers' personal beliefs have no place blocking freedoms guaranteed to Americans in the US Constitution."
Shenna Bellows was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine from 2005 to 2013 and lobbied successfully many times for equal protection standards before the State Legislature. She has been endorsed by Feminist Majority PAC and the National Organization for Women's NOW PAC and has received numerous awards for her work on women's health and reproductive freedom from groups including the American Association of University Women, THE University of Maine Women's Studies Department, Mabel Wadsworth Women's Health Center and the Frances Perkins Center.
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