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U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception
An anonymous reader writes In a legislative first, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that for-profit companies can, in essence, hold religious views. Given the Supreme Court's earlier decisions granting corporations the right to express political support through monetary donations, this ruling is not all that surprising. Its scope does not extend beyond family-owned companies where "there's no real difference between the business and its owners." It also only applies to the contraception mandate of the health care law. The justices indicated that contraceptive coverage can still be obtained through exceptions to the mandate that have already been introduced to accommodate religious nonprofits. Those exceptions, which authorize insurance companies to provide the coverage instead of the employers, are currently being challenged in lower courts.
The "closely held" test is pretty meaningless, since the majority of U.S. corporations are closely held.
Further, Hobby Lobby still provides coverage for more than a dozen kinds of birth control. Just not the ones that can induce abortion of an already fertilized fetus.
Surely an atheist can believe that abortion is a murder and desire to have no part in it.
Atheists aren't psychopaths who wouldn't care either way.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We had it before the ACA's mandate. 85% of group health plans provided it. Non-profits in all 50 States and many local governments make it available to those who can't afford it. The cost is not prohibitive even for those without insurance who don't wish to avail themselves of the aforementioned options.
You're assuming all birth control methods are created equal. They aren't.
The pill is a comparatively poor method in terms of success rate (roughly 9%/year failure rate and needs to be taken religiously every day) compared to more recent methods, such as IUDs (0.2-0.8% failure rate, depending on type. Basically foolproof as they're insert-and-forget for 3+ years) and implants (0.05% (this is actually better than the success rate for tubal ligation), insert-and-forget for 4 years).
The mandate expanded the state of things from "Oh, you're poor, so you get the failure-prone pill because it's cheap" to "Take your pick of any method, they're all covered", which is a good thing. Saddling people who can least afford a child with the most failure-prone method for preventing that is a recipe for disaster.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yes yes, No True Catholic.
If you started expunging all the insufficiently devout Catholics, there probably wouldn't be much left of the church when you were done.
Though that may not be a bad thing.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
That's kind of the crux of the matter, isn't it? A month of generic birth control pills costs about $10/mo. Purchased in bulk, condoms are about $0.50/ea. Both are readily available at no cost from a variety of sources for those who can't afford them. Setting aside the heated political debate, it seems foolish to route these sorts of purchases through your insurance company, with inevitable overhead, rather than simply purchasing them yourself.
Great! The people least able to afford a pregnancy can only get the least-effective forms of birth control! Awesome! That's definitely not a bad idea.
Or we can offer them any method they want, including far more effective and foolproof ones (IUD, implant, etc.), all at the same cost, which is what the mandate is about.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
put their religion before the constitution. Shocking.
At least read a summary of the decision before opening your mouth and letting people know you didn't read.
This was NOT a constitutional decision, it has nothing to do with the constitution on either side. The constitutional issue was already decided in the 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith, in which is was decided that yes, the government can make laws that contradict religions.
In response to that, congress passed the RFRA (which Clinton endorsed, incidentally). The law says that if there is a reasonable way to avoid impinging on someone else's religion, the government should do so. In this case, the court found that there are reasonable ways to avoid forcing people to do what they don't want (for example, the government could offer free contraception, or they could do with corporations what they've already done with non-profits).
In short, it wasn't a constitutional issue at all. It was a reconciliation between two laws that were passed by congress. If congress wants to change the law, they are free to do so.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Essentially, if your own skin isn't in the game (your personal assets are shielded from your failed company), it isn't "your" business anymore.
Financially shielding yourself from company failure is one thing, and its also a myth to a degree. Losing your constitutionally protected right to speech because you are now part of an organization is something completely different.
Regarding the myth of being shielded from company failure. Go start a corporation. Now try to get a company credit card or other line of credit, the bank will require a personal guarantee on that card or credit line. The closely held corporations (5 or fewer people) that this ruling applies to general have skin in the game.
It takes a long and close working relationship before a bank will offer credit purely secured by company assets.
Chick-fil-A were attacked because they were openly bigoted.
Were there any documented cases of Chic-Fil-A refusing to serve someone because they were gay? Refusing to hire someone because they were gay? Attacking someone because they were gay?
LK
Since the guy you're actually asking seems to be uninterested in answering, I'll answer for you.
The answers are "no", "no", and "no".
What happened was that the president of Chik-Fil-A, Dan Cathy, expressed an opinion on same-sex marriage that was exactly what Barack Obama had expressed just a couple of years earlier and that HIllary Clinton had also expressed. Oddly, only one of these three people were harassed for their opinion.
Oddly, it happens to be the one of the three with the least power to effect any change in regard to the subject matter at hand. But, he doesn't claim to be a "Democrat", which is an allegiance which absolves one from all responsibility and repercussions from their opinions.
Do you have ESP?
I take this to mean you would have no problem with this ruling if instead of Hobby Lobby, the plaintiff had been a business that was not incorporated and whose owners, on religious grounds, objected to providing "morning after" contraceptive products to their employees?
This belief is based, it appears, on the notion that corporations, unlike natural persons, don't have "rights". Is that correct?
However, this case was not decided on Constitutional grounds (i.e., the Free Exercise clause had nothing to do with the case) so "Constitutional rights" have nothing to do with it. It was decided based on the terms of Federal statutory law - the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) which raised the bar with respect to the level of justification the Federal needs to intrude on a person's religious beliefs coupled with the Dictionary Act's well known definition of how all Federal legislation is to be interpreted.
The RFRA refers to 'persons' without, as far as I can tell, any qualification to exclude corporations so the portion Dictionary Act which specifies
applies and the therefore the protections in the RFRA apply to corporations as well.
This is a simple question of legislative interpretation and there appears to be little room for debate. There is much yammering about the effect of the decision, but the court's should not, in a matter of statutory law, pay much attention to that and clearly should not override the legislators except in response to Constitutional issues or cases where there is ambiguity, conflict, or vagueness in the law which they must resolve because the legislative process did not.
If it is the will of the people to neuter this opinion, it can be done the same way the RFRA and Dictionary Act were instituted and amended over time -- via the legislative process. If that doesn't happen, then in a democratic society we can safely assume that it is not the will of the governed to do so.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
How does "free speech" translate into "depriving people of medical benefits"?
No one claimed it does. Someone used the false meme from the citizens united decision that corporations are people. I respond to that. Apologies for not being clear.
And NO this is a situation where a Corporation is treated as a person -- or a "group of people".
Not really. This seems to be a situation where a law applies to both corporations and people. As other posters have pointed out the Dictionary Act states that legislation that applies to persons also applies to corporations and other organizations if this legislation does not define its scope, and since the Religious Freedom Restoration Act did not define any such scope it applies to corporations as well as persons.
So its seems to boil down to whether a corporation can hold a religious belief. The hobby lobby decisions seems to say that closely held corporations (5 or fewer owners) where the owners share a common religious belief would count as a corporation holding such belief.
If you incorporate -- for that benefit, you leave your provincial ideas behind.
Apparently not if there are 5 or fewer owners who share the same belief. In most such cases this would basically be a family owned business.
At one point the Catholic church didn't exist, then suddenly it did.