Posted on 12/30/2014 7:33:17 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The Supreme Court is heading in the wrong direction by allowing a corporation to impose its religious beliefs on its employees, according to David Gans, the director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center.
Gans co-authored the new book titled Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution with Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.
“This is the first time the Supreme Court has said corporations have this right in more than 200 years in our nation’s history,” Gans said during an event at the Cato Institute. “Hobby Lobby is big news because it does say for the first time in our nation’s history secular, for-profit corporations are entitled to religious free exercise rights.”
Gans said the Supreme Court’s decision has opened the door to new claims for other religious exemptions.
“We have to see what’s going to happen. Will the court give businesses religious exemptions from the anti-discrimination laws? I don’t think the court’s opinion really answers that question,” he said.
Gans said the Supreme Court distorted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, sponsored by Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in the House and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) in the Senate. He called the decision “a major expansion” in the rights of corporations. [2]
“It exalts the powers of corporations over their employees. It allows corporate CEOs to impose their religious beliefs on their employees and to deny them federal rights,” he said. “That’s a very troubling kind of exemption.”
Shapiro said the decision does not prioritize the beliefs of the employer over the employee.
“It’s saying if there are alternate ways of accomplishing the same goal – the employee gets the same exact right fulfilled, or what have you, through a different way – then you have to yield to the religious objection,” he said. “It’s not a situation of anyone who is employed here cannot use a particular kind of contraception.”
Shapiro said no right is being infringed upon as a result of the decision.
“The Department of Health and Human Services included 20 contraceptives as part of its minimum essential coverage that all insurance plans had to have to satisfy the Obamacare employer mandate,” he said. “Not complying with the mandate would have meant $1.3 million in daily fines.”
Shapiro noted that Hobby Lobby objected to four items on the list of 20, including morning-after pills.
“The essence of freedom is the government can’t willy-nilly force people to do things that violate their consciences,” he said. “Without this rule, women are still free to obtain abortions and contraceptives – whatever else isn’t illegal. They just can’t force companies to pay for it.”
Shapiro said the more government controls, whether it’s healthcare or education, the greater the battles are going to be over conflicting values.
“Nobody has been denied access to contraceptives, women can still buy, acquire whatever legal products they could before and there’s now more freedom for Americans to live their lives how they want without checking their conscience at the office door,” he said.
If the court has ruled that corporations are people when it comes to free speech as expressed through political donations then how can they rule that corporations are not people when it comes to religious freedom?
The UN globalists are making it up as they go along.
We see too many occurrences today where someone is forced to provide a service to someone else in the name of that someone else’s “right” to special government treatment. Should I be forced to bake a gay wedding cake? To provide access to abortion? Apparently we need a Constitutional amendment now just to re-clarify the 1st amendment. Not only should we be free to express our beliefs, but be free of the government forcing us to express the beliefs of others.
Not forcing beliefs on anyone. Anyone can go buy their own contraceptives. No one is stopping them.
If anyone really wants the government in their bedroom... sterilization or castration comes to mind...."don't doubt me..."
Let's hope!
The atheists in government have gotten away with FAR too much
Actually, they didn't rule that. The only place where "corporations are people" occurs in the Citizens United ruling is in the left's propaganda and in not-quite-those-words in a dissent. Citzens United and the Hobby Lobby ruling are both based on the rights of natural persons: both turn on the very sound legal principle that simply because one incorporates, one does not give up one's natural rights. In the case of Citizens United, the fact that a group of people created a corporation specifically to engage in political speech was held to not bar them from engaging in political advertising. In the case of Hobby Lobby, it was the rights of the owners of a closely held corporation to freedom of religion which was vindicated.
Quite frankly, I don't think Hobby Lobby went far enough. If a majority of the equitable interest in publicly held corporation is held by people with religiously-based moral scruples against abortion or contraception (or anything else for that matter), the shareholders should be able to vote to prevent the corporation from spending money on whatever they object to and the First Amendment's free-exercise clause should prevent the Federal Government from harming the corporation or its owners for doing so (and likewise the states and their subdivisions under prevailing 1st and 14th Amendment precedents).
I don’t think that will happen, since the Supreme Court just threw out the case of two Catholic firemen challenging the requirement that they ride in a gay pride parade with the fire engine, supporting an earlier ruling against the firemen that their appearance was incidental to the parade and thus not an imposition on their beliefs.
“This is the first time the Supreme Court has said corporations have this right in more than 200 years in our nation’s history,” Gans said during an event at the Cato Institute. “Hobby Lobby is big news because it does say for the first time in our nation’s history secular, for-profit corporations are entitled to religious free exercise rights.”
O God forbid... the first amendment actually limit the government rather than grant 2 Federal employee defined freedoms to the people. You know the way it is actually written with “Congress shall make no law....”
I forgot PJ don’t believe in any kind of God much-less understand any of the rights that God has graciously bestowed upon us.
“I don’t think that will happen, since the Supreme Court just threw out the case of two Catholic firemen challenging the requirement that they ride in a gay pride parade with the fire engine, supporting an earlier ruling against the firemen that their appearance was incidental to the parade and thus not an imposition on their beliefs.”
You would think that would also be a violation of sick and indecent exposure and workplace harassment.
Even in information technology if you are doing a forensics investigation and you find child porn your suppose to take your hands off and call the police.
The same way these federal empoyees ruled that State employees are not Agents of the state govermet protected by the 11th amendment so that they can be sued in federal court for carrying our their state job.
While in the same trial maintaining the mutually elusive position that they are State employees carrying out their official function so that the same function may be subject to direct Federal Employee judgement.
Its called a Legal fiction or in this case contradiction. You will find that our faithless Federal employees in black robes have become very found and accustom to their ever expanding list of legal fictions and contradictions designed only to expand their power into every matter written or unwritten in human behavior regardless of rather explicit Constitutional prohibitions such as that which was written in the 11th Amendment protecting the Sovereign immunity of the State.
Its ironic too, just 100 years before this edict the Federal Employees would have found themselves hanging from the highest tree for attempting to impose such a treasonous usurpation against our states. A threat to the same is how the 11th amendment rather quickly came about.
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