I don’t know the legal answer to that question – if it has been squarely addressed before, but the Hobby Lobby case was argued to the Supreme Court today and the question came to mind again. The ACA requires that if a corporation provides compensation to its employees in the form of health insurance benefits that the insurance include, among other things, coverage for contraception. The owners of the shares in Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. oppose on religious grounds certain IUDs and pills that prevent impregnation of a fertilized egg into the uterus.
In my mind, corporations are incapable of belief and the religious beliefs of individuals are distinct from the religious beliefs of the corporations in which they have an ownership interest.
Corporations are a government created legal fiction designed to limit personal responsibility. There is obviously utility to the corporate structure. But, I don’t understand how religious beliefs can get through the corporate shield but personal liability cannot.
I could probably get behind allowing individual owners to abandon the corporate form and exercise their religious beliefs to avoid the contraception mandate if they felt that strongly about it. Or, better yet, go single payer and disassociate insurance and employment altogether.
I’m still trying to find the part where Jesus told women not to use an IUD. Maybe it’s in Corinthians. Lots of strange stuff in that book.
Yeah. There’s nothing in there against genocide or random acts of nuclear annihilation, either.
Really? The stuff about turning cheeks and not murdering people is not in there? Wow, conservatives edited more of it than I remembered .
That’s nothing I can call a dumb theory, Doug, since I wrestled with it early on in these cases. But I’m darned if I can see how a corporation can be an African-American for purposes of discrimination law but not a Christian (or Buddhist, or Jewish, or whatever) for purposes of religious exemptions from laws it finds morally objectionable.
That’s a fair point.
The use of racial or female ownership of companies for purposes of discrimination law has to do with just that — ownership. The company has to prove that it is wholly or substantially owned by that person (though certainly in Chicago it hasn’t been unheard of for white interests to put a black face on a front organization to make sure the city contracts still head their way).
Might the Supreme Court make the same breakdown? If, for example, a company is 100 percent owned or substantially owned by a person of faith, then the religious exemption applies. If it’s publicly held or ownership is somehow diluted, then no. Then again, the Supreme Court has already said corporations are people, my friends, so it might not put that fine a point on it.
I’m usually not one to fall down the slippery slope, but a ruling in Hobby Lobby’s favor might seem to risk all sorts of discrimination employed in the name of religion. Can a company refuse to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple based on religious objections? Could a company refuses service to Jews, Muslims — or Christians? Could a company owned by a Christian Scientist elect not to provide health insurance at all?
I really like your last point, separating health insurance from employment would be the absolute best thing that we could do for the business community. As someone that has sold insurance for a couple of decades, it amazes me that more employers are not for this. The man hours wasted trying to find coverage that is satisfactory to their employees every year could be much better utilized making themselves more efficient and competitive.
Single payer? The facts that single payer systems are more efficient, the people are healthier and the costs are cheaper are just a bump in the road for the ideologue who wants to scare us with “socialism”. When the healthcare law was being debated, a reporter asked a German reporter what he thought about the whole debacle. He said he was amazed that Americans claimed it was their right to pay twice the price and get half the healthcare. When you can win a complex argument by saying one word, that’s power. It’s also demagoguery.
This, a thousand times this.
Well stated. Stuart. The US healtcare system is a western disaster. But it is what came out of a far right AHA and AMA. Now, the AMA and the AMA worship Medicare and Medicaid revenues. America. Costs more, delivers less.
I wonder if a slightly different scenario is occurring. We know that the Supremes have been given a lot of grief about the Citizen’s United decisions, and that they may be feeling some need or pressure to look more closely at the role and boundaries of corporations. Could it be that they really don’t care about the “religious freedom” issue as they do about more carefully defining corporations, and that this is their opportunity?
I could certainly see Chief Justice Roberts being inclined in that direction, not so much Alito and Thomas. Probably not Scalia either – he can sometimes go outside the box but in religious matters, I get the sense that it’s particularly important to him to preserve the role of religion in society. And, because this question of corporations is coming to him in the context of a discussion on religion, I don’t imagine he’ll take a detour due to concerns over the corporate form.
5-4 against with Kennedy being the swing vote.
Can corporations have political beliefs?
Hobby Lobby won. No requirement to provide contraception.