Some interesting thoughts on corporate religion today from some of my favorite bloggers. Tipsy, who is opposed to the Obamacare contraception mandate has a post entitled Corporate Freedom of Religion? wherein he notes that, opposed as he is to the policy, the idea of corporations having religious beliefs gives him pause.
Sheila Kennedy, generally in favor of the mandate, has a post entitled Thus Spake the Profits noting that the religious beliefs of the Hobby Lobby corporation doesn’t seem to extend to an objection to stocking inventory produced cheaply in a country with mandatory forced abortions.
Both raise the question of when and how a corporation, a legal fiction, can be said to believe anything. How close do they have to be to the activity? Is the corporate veil pierced to allow its owners’ religious beliefs to leak through to its employees but not to allow its owners’ profits to leak through to its creditors? Are those religious beliefs offended if its employees are allowed to use money from their paycheck to fund immoral behavior? Allowed to use compensation in the form of insurance to fund immoral behavior? Are those religious beliefs offended where products come from suppliers with morally objectionable behavior?
And, just because it’s a hobby horse of mine, I’ll take a moment to reiterate that I don’t think libertarians can logically embrace the corporate form. It’s a government construct designed to shield an individual from personal responsibility for the consequences of his or her actions; about as anti-libertarian as you can get.
In any event, I already think we’ve gone too far with the “corporations are people” legal fiction. They have their uses, and policy and legal protections should reflect those uses. But, they are different from flesh and blood people in fundamental ways. Not having the capacity to believe anything is one of those differences.
Yes, the legal fiction is being applied too broadly. “Person” in the sense of an entity that may act as a party in litigation. Beyond that, the fiction (an analogy, I’d say) loses traction.
We seem to have taken this issue far past the Supreme Court’s sometimes labored decisions concerning just where the line is between a religous organization’s “core religous functions, which are given great if not conclusive deference, and those in which the organization must be treated exactly the same as any other employer, etc. Now we are talking about corporations (however thin or thick the corporate veil) who want to extend those boundaries well beyond where they have been. What singles out objections to contraception and abortion from being morally opposed to spending corporate tax revenues to fund a war considered to be against the teachings of Christ? Something tells me that when the issues are more on the left than to the right, the Hobby Lobby’s of the world whistle a different tune.
Corporations have purposes other than protection against individual liability. At their core, they are organizations of individuals which combine together for a particular purpose, sometimes for profit, sometimes not. However, the fact is that the main owners of major corporations are themselves other corporations or similar entities, for the purpose of investment. It being impossible to identify any human purpose, or moral belief, in a corporation, except for that portion who have active control of same, how then does a corporation have “moral” or religious beliefs?