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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.
So I hope that a business can refuse to pay for it even without having to pretend to believe in an invisible man in the sky..
If not, I hope one of them sues, because the government is then preferring one religion over another.
(I think this, and many other things, should be paid for by the person themselves...)
put their religion before the constitution. Shocking.
Religious fuckers are destroying this country.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
I's insurances, IT goes into a pool. Telling people they can't use it because of someone else's religion is THE single most unConstitutional thing they could have done.
IT's not freedom, it's religious zealotry. This is the same shit that change the mideast from a open democracy in the 40-5 and 50s into the religious cluster fuck it is now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Unfortunately we can extend that to a variety of things. Do your 'sincerely held religious beliefs' outlaw blood transfusions? Looks like your exployees are going to be paying for that themselves. Organ transplants? I'm sure insurance companies would love that. Like many things, the problem isn't the scenario at hand. Its the precedent and how it will be abused.
My religion says that killing is wrong. Can I refuse to pay the percentage of taxes which goes to the military?
To start with Hobby lobby was NOT against contraceptives, and offered it to their employees. They were against 'after the fact' options. Like "plan B".
Avoiding the truth was a plan to harass and go after them using media bias, much like Chick-fil-A was attacked.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It was a few hundred years before that when corporations were created as legal persons who could purchase ships, undertake voyages, be sued, etc.
The whole idea of a corporation is that me, you, and a hundred other people can pool our resources to do something big, such as buying and outfitting a ship (or ISP), and if something went wrong a creditor could take the ship and its cargo, but you wouldn't be risking your house. As a legal person, the corporation could be sued, rather than filing 100 law suits against each of the individual investors, none of which could pay the judgement.
You bitch about paying for welfare kids, and you bitch about women not wanting kids to abort them. PICK ONE AND STFU!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'll be cool with the ACA mandating equal pricing for the genders when my auto insurance company is held to the same standard.
Shakrai, male, 32, 790 FICO score, zero moving violations, zero accidents, six month premium for 2012 Honda Civic: $450
Shakrai's ex-gf, female, 31, 710 FICO score, three moving violations, two at fault accidents, six month premium for 2011 Honda Civic: $390
Same liability limits, I had higher physical damage deductibles, and a 10% discount for defensive driver training that she lacked, both through Progressive.
I wonder when the big man at 1600 Pennsylvania is going to fix this gender disparity?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Healthcare is a form of compensation, just like your wages, your employer can not tell you how to spend your wages, why can they tell me what healthcare services I can utilize? Also, companies don't "pay" for healthcare like its some sort of charity they generously give to there subjects, employees pay for it themselves by providing work for the company!
Perhaps I misunderstood.
Who said the employee couldn't use contraception? The employee is still free to obtain and use contraception on their own or through a provision - it just isn't forced upon the company to purchase it which seems equally fair. In addition to the employee purchasing (or using the provisions) for the contraception, then they are also free to work in another with/without religious beliefs who will purchase it.
the idea of "when life starts" which is a philosophical, not a scientific problem
Pro-life scientists point out that an embryo is a distinct organism because it has distinct DNA. The life associated with that DNA thus begins when sperm meets egg.
Getting hormonal birth control from a doctor other than your regular doctor means that those two doctors have to both have access to your medical records or both consult on any issues you might have
Isn't that the whole point of the push for EMRs? And what stops her from seeing the regular doc then getting the script filled at a clinic? Or just paying the $10/mo for it? My insurance company isn't giving me free condoms, and I don't have any get out of jail free cards made available to me if my birth control fails.
Condom breaks and the woman doesn't want a kid with the guy? She can take the morning after pill, get an abortion, or give the child up for adoption. Man doesn't want a child with this woman? Too bad asshole, we're going to confiscate 15% to 25% of your post-FICA earnings for the next 18 years, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, even if she broke the condom in the first place or lied about being on pills.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Coupling the two has always been a cluster fuck. This is just one more reason to abolish this particular linkage.
earned benefits are the property of the employee. There were already mechanisms in the ACA that would have shielded an employer from "paying" for abortion. But an employer has no more right to say how an employee uses a benefit as they do their earned money. This decision will not stand the test of time. It will fall in a like manner that the Bowers v. Hardwick case was revisited and overturned decades later with the majority opinion admitting the SCOTUS had been "wrong".
Corporations are people too.
As in the Citizen's United case, this ruling is a complete perversion of constitutional rights on the American Public, and both as abominable as Plessy v. Ferguson. Here's the train of logic that the majority took:
1) Take a piece of legislation originally designed to protect sacred American Indian worship sites, though more broadly individual religious freedoms,
2) And extend those freedoms to corporations with this hocus-pocus incantation: "The purpose of extending rights to corporations is to protect the rights of people associated with the corporation, including shareholders, officers, and employees." (573 U.S. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Syllabus, pg. 3)
And while I was never a fan of Ginsburg in my younger years, given the recent evolution of the SCotUS, that opinion is rapidly changing, especially when she has this to say on the matter (573 U.S. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Ginsburg dissent, pg. 14):
Until this (Citizens United) litigation, no decision of this Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law...the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities. As Chief Justice Marshall observed nearly two centuries ago, a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 [1819]).
Should just rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution now to read, "We the Corporations of the United States..."
But an employer has no more right to say how an employee uses a benefit as they do their earned money.
Oh, really? They do it all the time. An employer's very choice to give you a particular defined benefit rather than the money they pay for it is itself saying how you can use it. Just try to get a large employer to give you the money in lieu of the benefit. Or even to buy a different kind of insurance plan than the one they dictate. Good luck with that.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
As a follower of THOR, the God of Thunder, I have been forced to operate my business in a manner which directly contradicts my faith. Government mandated building codes have forced me to maintain so-called safe electrical wiring so that my employees don't get electrocuted. I sincerely believe that this is merely a way for the faithless cowards to avoid Thor's judgment. You see, if you die of electrocution, it means that you have offended the Thunderer and have been righteously smitten by his divine will.
Thor asks little of us, save that we provide an offering of mead to him at each meal. Yet most of my foolish employees would deny him even this small request. That I'm forced to provide buildings which shield these wicked individuals with safe, modern, electrical wiring is a troubling incursion upon my religious freedoms as a business owner. I feared that if I continued to follow the Government's secular laws, that I would be denied access to Valhalla.
Thanks to the Supreme Court's wise decision today, Obama and all of the witless cretins in my employ shall soon feel the wrath of Thor's mighty hammer, Mjolnir!
Praise be to Thor!
Saying they ARE people is a power grab ...
The US Supreme Court did **not** say that corporations are people. A spokesperson for the losing side in the court case gratuitously characterized the decision that way, in other words it was just political spin on the decision.
What the Court actually said is that
(1) Groups of people have the same free speech rights are individual persons.
(2) It doesn't matter what the nature of the group of people is; corporation, labor union, public interest group, etc.
Corporations have ONE religion, and that is to make as much money as possible.
Except many of them don't, of their own choice. They put their profits into humanitarian endeavors. Especially corporations such as the one that owns Hobby Lobby., where the owners' religious beliefs preclude a lavish lifestyle.
They are under common law obligations to screw over people to do so.
This has been stated on this board repeatedly, and it is completely incorrect. The person who explained the court case to you was either lying to you, functionally illiterate and unable to make sense of a court paper, or simply parroting lies that had been said to them earlier. Please read Dodge v Ford Motor Company, and stop parroting this lie to others.
Tto say they have religious convictions is absurdity at its finest.
You obviously have to clue what is actually the case here, with this corporation. As a non-religious person myself, I find it unfortunate that your own feelings about religion override your sensibilities.
Watch the abuse begin. It's the latest slip down the slippery slope started in 1800s when the absurd idea of "Corporate Personhood" started.
Watch the abuse that tries to begin get slapped down instantly, since this ruling stated it is only covering this one particular aspect of the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Is a baby chicken a baby chicken when the fertilized egg/sperm combo has divided into 16 cells, none of which have differentiated, none of which are nerves, spine, brain, eye, etc.?
The answer to that -- obviously, unless you're utterly bewildered or completely ignorant of the process itself -- is no. It's not philosophical; it's fact-based science. A potato is more sophisticated. Its cells even have more chromosomes than humans do.
The line is blurry, all right, but it isn't blurry at conception (that's not a person OR a chicken) and it isn't blurry anywhere near term (that IS a person or a chicken.) The blurry part, that's the real problem, because the determination needs to be based on something rational and functionally able to ensure we do not do unintended harm or harm in ignorance. Religious hucksterism aside, there are readily determinable progressions in the process that cross various well defined lines.
Personally, I view it this way: If the organism doesn't have a differentiated nervous system, at best, it is directly comparable in its current state to plant life. As soon as it does, however, you've got animal life, and now we've crossed a line where the well-being of something that can feel is at stake.
The entire argument is muddied by the concept of potential; I agree potential is there, but it was also there for every sperm that missed the mark and every egg that remained unfertilized.
So -- were I able to make it so, which is not only not the case but laughably far from the case -- I'd draw the line for abortion that is not directly amelioration for serious health risk to the mother, or a consequence of known problems with the growing organism (no brain, etc.) right where the nervous system begins to develop such that there are actual nerves present.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Pregnancy: it takes two to happen, but it's always the woman's fault.
And the resultant expense is always the man's responsibility.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sorry, but a corporation is not "just" a group of people.
If a group of people breach a contract, you can sue them and they will have to pay you back from their own assets. If a corporation breaches a contract, you can only touch corporate assets.
If a group of people dump toxins into the environment, they can be personally fined and put in jail. If a corporation dumps toxins into the environment, the corporation pays a fine and the people who initiated the dumping don't get touched.
If a group of people destroy the economy through fraud, they can be fined and put in jail. If a corporation destroys the economy through fraud, it gets a slap on the wrist from the SEC.
The law treats corporations differently from "groups of people" in many respects. One of those respects should be their rights. The underlying people have the same rights as before, but the corporation -- as its own entity -- need not have all the same rights as those people.
We need a 28th Amendment to the Constitution - All rights specified in the Constitution of the United States and all Amendments thereto shall apply to Natural Persons only.
We can call it the Commonsense clause.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Completely, 100% wrong. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. That's all it is. Anything else, *anything*, is an add on from some other idea. I'm absolutely, completely, atheist -- I hold no belief in a god or gods whatsoever -- but I am not opposed to religion, in fact, I can cite you chapter and verse as to many of the benefits religion brings, and has brought, to our society. I live in a church. What I am opposed to is any particular religion getting control of law and/or government. Because that has demonstrably caused harm almost without surcease. But again, even this is not a consequence of my position that the idea of god or gods is ridiculous, rather it is a consequence of my observation that every religiously influenced law I know of is extremely bad law, and furthermore, tends to favor group A over group B in such a way that there is no sane basis for it.
Theism: Belief in a god or gods.
Atheism: Without belief in a god or gods.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
Health insurance companies have actuarial evidence just as strong as auto insurance companies do. The only real difference is that governments haven't (yet) told auto insurance companies that they must provide subsidies from some specific groups to others.
You can get 50% off all your groceries for a week! Faith holders earn points on every purchase that can be redeemed at any of our outlets in heaven! Switch your religion to Waltonism and start saving today!
(This offer does not apply to purchases of contraceptives.)
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
"Citizens_United" Corporations are people too.
In the Citizens United case the US Supreme Court did **not** say that corporations are people. A spokesperson for the losing side in the court case gratuitously characterized the decision that way, in other words it was just political spin on the decision.
What the Court actually said is that
(1) Groups of people have the same free speech rights as individual persons.
(2) It doesn't matter what the nature of the group of people is; corporation, labor union, public interest group, etc -- any organization will do.
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.
This would be meaningful if any of the following were false:
To my mind, this money belongs to the employees as part of their health benefits package, and the employees should have the ultimate decision on how money is spent on their health.
Ignorance of the rankest degree.
1) They aren't free.
The law simply requires that any plan offered by a company must meet some set of minimum coverage. Among that was a requirement that all preventative healthcare must have zero cost sharing or copays. IE, paid for entirely by premiums, no out of pocket cost when you go to get them done. Why? Because preventitive care and tests are a helluva lot cheaper than the alternatives. And that included basic contraception.
2) They never paid for it in the first place.
You, the employee did, via your premiums.
But, you say, "the employer kicks in funds" .... yes, funds that you earned by your work and accepted in lieu of additional wages. It's a basic economic truth that those funds the employer kicks are YOURS not the employer's. The are two reason for the employer to engage in this behaviour: 1) Tax breaks (which the ACA further enhanced) to incentivize it, and 2) the employer, essentially buying insurance in bulk can get a better price as compared to if every employee bought insurance individually.
3) This decision is exceptionally broad. It breaks the corporate viel rendering it meaningless. They say it's limited to JUST contraceptives (and thus, religious ideas agaisnt vaccines and bloodtransfusions are in theory not allowed, and thus THOSE mandatory coverages must still occur)...but that's actually quite doubtful. This is the first step down the road of "Bob, I didn't see you at morning prayers. I really need to be there on time."
This is not a step towards freedom and if you believe that, you're an idiot.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Not quite.
The law requires, as part of that "minimum level of coverage" that preventive healthcare to be covered by all insurance plans at zero out of pocket cost. ie, no copays, no cost sharing, no coinsurance, etc. Instead they are paid out of premiums only. One of those preventitive things is contraception.
So if a company buys a plan for its employees, it much meet those minimums.
Hobby Lobby objected to the requirement for contraception.
The legal way out for HL was just NOT PROVIDE INSURANCE, in which another part of the law would kick in, and the employees, having no employer sponsored plan, would then be eligible for subsidies on the exchange, and the company would pay a pentaly (the stick of the carrot/stick approach in the law to incentivizing companies into sponsoring insurance; the carrot is the massive tax break they get for it).
But HL didnt want to pay a penalty.
And HL also still wanted their tax break.
So, HL still wanted to ffer insurance....just without meeting the minimum requirements.
HL wanted all the benefits of hte law, without the requirements of it.
They wanted their cake, and to eat it too.
And unfortunately for the country, they got it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And one of those types are IUDs. My wife has one of those to regulate endometriosis which can be quite painful to deal with. Her doctors recommended using it instead of the normal birth control pills (which she has tried in the past) and it works. The fact that this works as birth control is a side benefit. (We already have 2 kids and don't want/can't afford any more.) However, this ruling would give an employer the right to say "we object to this because of 'religious reasons' so we're not going to cover it in your employer provided health care." Then, if we wanted this device to manage my wife's medical condition, we'd be forced to pay full cost out of pocket.
However, if I needed "little blue pills" and was employed at Hobby Lobby, they would be more than happy to provide them to me. They also see nothing wrong in investing in the contraception companies in their 401K. Apparently, making money off of "godless abortion pills" is perfectly fine religiously.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Hobby Lobby's owners find it religiously objectionable to provide health care to its female employees that includes birth control.
Completely untrue. Hobby Lobby provides 16 different types of contraception to its employees.
Here's their statement:
"The Green family has no moral objection to the use of 16 of 20 preventive contraceptives required in the mandate, and Hobby Lobby will continue its longstanding practice of covering these preventive contraceptives for its employees. However, the Green family cannot provide or pay for four potentially life-threatening drugs and devices. These drugs include Plan B and Ella, the so-called morning-after pill and the week-after pill. Covering these drugs and devices would violate their deeply held religious belief that life begins at the moment of conception, when an egg is fertilized.
How outrageous!