Insanity Wrap: Legal Damages for Hurt Feelings and the End of Religious Freedom

(AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

Welcome to Insanity Wrap, your weekly dose of the best of the worst. Whether religious freedom will be held hostage to snowflakes’ tender widdle feelz is the new big crazy.

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Plus:

  • Twitter allows #MAYOMONKEYSGOTTAGO to trend
  • DOCTOR Jill Biden Christmas-snubs her illegitimate granddaughter
  • Colorado mental health pros opting out of single-payer

Before we get to today’s big story, here’s a short video to make you lose whatever little faith you might still have in humanity.


This Is Not a Sane World, Exhibit #1,000,006

It’s Insanity Wrap’s sad duty to report that #MAYOMONKEYSGOTTAGO was trending on Twitter last night. How much of the explicit racism was genuine and how much was just ginned up by bots and antisocial opportunists, we’ll never know.

On the other hand, if someone wants to call us “Chalk Demon,” that actually sounds kinda cool.

Honestly, some of these “derogatory” terms are so funny that Insanity Wrap thinks our TikToker might be putting everyone on.

We certainly hope so.


SCOTUS Could Seal the Fate of Religious Freedom

SCOTUS and Religious Freedom
(Image by Mark Thomas from Pixabay.)
Supreme Court Will Determine If Customers Can Sue Businesses for ‘Emotional Distress.’ This Has Serious Implications for Religious Freedom

Insanity Wrap won’t bother you with all the details of Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, since The Daily Signal’s Sarah Parshall Perry has already done a bang-up job of just that [Link above].

The short version is that Jane Cummings, who is deaf and legally blind, wanted a rehab clinic to provide her with an interpreter. They declined, according to Perry, and instead offered “to communicate with her through written notes, lip reading, and gesturing.”

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Later, Cummings would sue for “humiliation, frustration, and emotional distress.”

Again, without getting too much into the legal nitty-gritty, Perry says:

Cummings does not claim she endured physical injuries, incurred financial harm, or suffered any other tangible loss as a result of Premier Rehab’s denying her an interpreter. Rather, she is suing solely on the basis of emotional distress.

“The ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision,” Perry argues, “will likely extend far beyond disability law” because “Emotional distress is almost entirely subjective and could be used as a pretext to sue people and businesses under anti-discrimination law where the only alleged discriminatory conduct involved is honoring one’s religious beliefs.”

Think, she says, of “medical practitioners who refuse to perform mastectomies on transgender patients or bakeries that decline to make custom cakes for same-sex couples.”

Insanity Wrap saw all this coming almost 30 years ago, when we worked briefly for one of those major corporations with a — shudder — Human Resources department.

The year was 1993, and the topic was sexual harassment — still a hot-button issue after the Clarence Thomas hearings.

For a few hours, we were required to endure some proto-Karen from HR explaining to us that sexual harassment was in the eye of the harassed.

Really.

Proto-K told all of us employees — her minions, her demeanor told us — that if someone felt harassed, then they had been harassed.

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Insanity Wrap was young and foolish enough to speak up at that point.

“If someone’s feelings are the standard, then how can we know what’s OK and what can get us fired or sued?” or words to that effect. “If I ask someone if they want to grab a cup of coffee, and they think I’m looking at them funny when I ask it, I’m in trouble?”

Karen gave me a look that might have killed a lesser being.

Having made our point, we shut up — and never asked anyone out for coffee again.

But the slippery slope had been set by HR departments across the country in the wake of those Thomas hearings. When feelz become the legal standard, there are no standards. And yet, ignorance of the law is still no excuse, even when the only thing someone is ignorant of is what’s going on inside someone else’s skull.

The Left poisoned objective law, under cover of protecting women from workplace scoundrels. Meanwhile, low-level workers like Young Insanity Wrap were made to feel guilty and wicked without having done anything wrong or holding enough power to sexually harass anyone.

Everything since is just details and Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller looks like it could be a big detail.


Recommended: MANDATE CAVE: White House Suspends Vaccine Mandate for Fed Employees


Joe Biden’s Return to Decency or Whatevs

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Don’t forget, somewhere in Arkansas is a three-year-old girl whose father is a no-show and whose grandfather — the alleged president of the United States — and grandmother have never publicly acknowledged her existence.

Not even with a stocking on the fireplace.


The Craziest Person in the World (This Week)

Alicia Garza, from left, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, arrive at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards at NeueHouse Hollywood on Monda
More cops equals fewer black murder victims, university criminologists say

Some things seem so self-evident that they hardly merit a study. Still, it’s nice when a study puts actual numbers in your brain for what you already knew in your gut:

A team of criminologists has found that every 10 to 17 new cops added by a city police department can be expected to save one black person from being murdered.

The researchers looked at 242 cities over a 38-year period and concluded “that each additional police officer hired abates between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides.”

Black lives do matter — just not to the #DefundThePolice leadership at Black Lives Matter.

You’d have to be the craziest person in the world not to see that by now.


And Now For a Brief Moment of Sanity

Endorsed!


Previously On Insanity Wrap: Introducing Joe Biden’s Weapons-Grade IRS

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Your Weekly Dose of Mandated Unity

Free Health Care

Colorado mental health therapists are quitting Medicaid over latest payment debacle

Meanwhile, in Insanity Wrap’s neck of the woods:

Two years after opening her practice, D’Agostino-Vigil is among the latest round of health care providers in Colorado who are quitting the Medicaid program. Nearly half of the 175 patients at Ignite Counseling Colorado are on Medicaid, and during a six-month transition phase, D’Agostino-Vigil will “try like heck” to find other counselors who will take them. If that doesn’t work, she intends to continue helping some pro bono.

Her list of reasons is long. There was the 20% rate cut in 2020, just ahead of an increase in need for mental health care because of the isolating days of the pandemic. There were the threatening letters warning her that she was “overusing” a billing code — the code for a full hour of therapy — and that she should instead see patients for 30- or 45-minute sessions.

But what pushed D’Agostino-Vigil, one of the only specialists in obsessive compulsive disorder taking Medicaid in Colorado, over the edge was a “recoupment” notice received by her practice and nearly 200 others in Colorado this fall. The letter said that due to incorrectly filed claims, providers would have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to the agency – called Colorado Community Health Alliance — that dispenses their payments. In some cases, recoupment amounts have totaled $17,000 or $18,000 for a single mental health therapist in private practice.

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Just because government “pays” for your health care doesn’t mean abused health care professionals have to provide it.


One More Thing…

Omicron
(Seen on PJ Media’s infamous Slack channel.)

That’s a Wrap for today.

Come back next week for another Insanity Wrap…

…assuming we make it that long.


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