Rekha Basu: Court steps into religion quagmire

BY REKHA BASU, Des Moines Register

The Supreme Court: The presumption of impartiality rests on the assumption that mere men are above human beliefs and passion or defects.

[L]et’s say that I’m an observant Hindu who keeps a strict vegetarian diet because my religion frowns on killing animals. And let’s say I own a software company that employs only vegetarians, because I don’t believe I should be forced to subsidize meat-eating with the money I pay in salaries. Could I get away with that that sort of discrimination?

Apparently I could, if you follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s logic in a ruling Monday that a company should not be forced to subsidize an activity that offends its owners’ religious beliefs. The court ruled that Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. may be exempted from the federal government’s mandate that for-profit corporations’ employee health plans cover all 20 types of contraception. Their Christian owners believe life begins at conception and oppose four contraceptive methods that interfere with implantation of a fertilized egg. It makes no difference under the ruling if the employee shares those beliefs, or even that religion. “It is not for the Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion.

The impact of the ruling has been analyzed mostly through the prisms of birth control and the Affordable Care Act. But the implications of allowing private companies to opt out of certain laws for religious reasons are sweeping, and dangerous. If a company can dictate how employees spend their salary or benefits according to its owners’ religious beliefs, at what point does religious accommodation of an employer end and religious discrimination against employees begin?

The court should have left religious exemptions to religious and nonprofit organizations.

The court majority tried to tailor its ruling to “closely held” corporations and certain types of contraception. But the rationale could become precedent in ways that even Christian groups hailing the ruling in the name of religious freedom would take serious issue with. What if a conservative Muslim or Hasidic Jewish business owner believes women and men should not work in close physical proximity to each other so it won’t hire women?

“Although the Court attempts to cabin its language to closely held corporations, its logic extends to corporations of any size, public or private,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a dissenting opinion. “Little doubt that RFRA – the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act the majority opinion cited – claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood – combined with its other errors in construing RFRA – invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.”

It seems unlikely the court would have been as accepting of a case brought by employers from minority religions such as Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. But this ruling allows business owners of any faith to claim religious exemptions. “In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprieterships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs,” wrote Ginsburg.

The ruling will probably be used to justify anti-gay business policies such as those of the Gortz Haus in Grimes, Iowa, whose owners claimed the Iowa Civil Rights Commission was forcing them to violate their religious beliefs by accommodating a same-sex wedding. Ginsburg cited the case of a New Mexico photographer refusing to photograph a lesbian couple’s commitment ceremony for religious reasons. And in a Minnesota case, the born-again Christian owners of health clubs cited biblical objections to employing people who live together unmarried, as well as “fornicators and homosexuals.”

“Would RFRA require exemptions in cases of this ilk?” asked Ginsburg’s dissent. “And if not, how does the Court divine which religious beliefs are worthy of accommodation, and which are not?” Under the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, the government can’t play favorites with religions.

The court’s conservative majority may have thought it was protecting the religious rights of Christian-owned companies by contradicting an earlier ruling that upheld the firings and denial of unemployment benefits to two Native Americans who used peyote – illegal in Oregon – as part of their religious ceremony. That ruling said, “An individual’s religious beliefs (do not) excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate” In this case, as Ginsburg pointed out, the Affordable Care law is being broken.

Much as some might wish otherwise, America is a pluralistic nation without a state religion, and the government is not allowed to pick and choose which religions can claim certain rights or exemptions. The ironic result of this wrongheaded ruling may be that business-owners of every faith will claim a religious right to discriminate, in decisions from health coverage to employment to buying, selling and accommodations. That’s a long way from how the founders conceived of religious freedom.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her email at rbasu@dmreg.com.
Source: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2014/07/02/3730457/rekha-basu-court-steps-into-religion.html#storylink=cpy

McClatchy Tribune News Service

At the Core of the U.S. Supreme Court, A Cabal of Corporate Hit Men

BARCorporatePersonhood

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

[T]he U.S. Supreme Court’s concept of corporate “personhood” apparently means that corporate religious rights – corporate gods – trump “the religious or secular beliefs of working people – specifically, working women.”

“The Federalist Society, a cabal of corporate conspirators, is always only one vote away from an outright majority on the nation’s highest court.”

The U.S. Supreme Court acted with reactionary zeal, this week, to accelerate the march of corporate power into every nook and cranny of American life. The High Court handed down three decisions [7] that most dramatically affect women, but are mainly intended to buttress the rule of the moneyed classes. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby [8], the justices ruled that private corporations owned by religious fundamentalists have the right to eliminate contraceptive services from employee health plans, thus establishing the supremacy of corporate gods over the religious or secular beliefs of working people – specifically, working women. Thanks to the High Court, overwhelmingly female and non-white home health care employees – who have historically been among the country’s most poorly paid and oppressed workers, often laboring long hours with no benefits, no sick leave, and no security – will find it much harder to unionize [9]. And, the Supreme Court decreed that women considering abortions at the dwindling number of clinics that provide such services will have to run the gauntlet of anti-abortion crazies, who can no longer be kept at a physical distance from the targets of their venomous free speech.

With every passing year, the federal courts become more firmly the domain of right-wing lawyers, whose mission is to set in stone the legal basis for a dictatorship of the rich. These judicial political hit men, including some women and lawyers of color, are chiefly organized under the banner of the Federalist Society [10]. Formed in 1982 at the elite law schools at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago, the Federalist Society is most zealous in defending the rights of property and corporations. It now boasts 30,000 lawyers and 10,000 law students as members, including four of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and chief justice John Roberts. That means the Federalist Society, a cabal of corporate conspirators, is always only one vote away from an outright majority on the nation’s highest court.

Money’s Unlimited Right to Speak

They are a devilishly clever crew, who revel in using the Bill of Rights as a weapon against the people. “Freedom of speech” was key to the Supreme Court majority’s arguments in the three recent cases. Justice Alito wrote that freedom of speech means workers cannot be forced to subsidize the speech of unions with whom they disagree. The ruling is a boon to corporate investors who want to corner the home health care market, which is projected to grow by 48 percent [11] in the next eight years. Fewer unionized workers means higher profits. The High Court is super-sensitive to the free speech rights of anti-abortion activists, even as it typically sides with the State in creating vast zones where no free speech is allowed for those who oppose U.S. wars and corporate globalization. And, the Court’s recognition of corporate religious rights is based on the same bogus principle of corporate “personhood” that underlay its decision to allow virtually unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns as a form of freedom of speech.

The Supreme Court’s legal logic grows clearer every year: The people have no rights that corporations are bound to respect.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com, and sign up to get email notifications when a new issue is published, each Wednesday.

Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [12].

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20140702_gf_SCOTUS.mp3

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/core-us-supreme-court-cabal-corporate-hit-men

Doing the Radical Right’s Dirty Work: Supreme Court’s Latest Blows Against Women and Unions

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

The Supreme Court: The presumption of impartiality rests on the assumption that mere men are above human beliefs and passion, defects, or class ideology. All of these naive assumptions have been resolutely put to rest by the Roberts Court, the most reactionary and partisan court in history.

[O]n the final day of its term, the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing majority has dealt crippling blows to two causes close to the heart of progressives.

It elevated the rights of corporations owned by fundamentalist Christians above the rights of their female employees, saying those businesses don’t have to pay for any contraception in health plans. And it ruled that non-union employees who work at jobs where unions negotiate pay and benefits—for all workers—do not have to pay any union fees akin to union dues.

In both instances, the Court’s right-wing block delivered what have long been goals of two distinct factions of the Republican Party.

For religious conservatives, it said that protecting religious freedom was a higher priority than ensuring women received all reproductive health options. It also said that corporations have First Amendment religious rights protected by the First Amendment, a win for Christian fundamentalists and religious business owners. And for the GOP’s union-busting business wing, epitomized by the Koch brothers’ libertarian political network, it said that union fees could not be collected for electioneering purposes—even if non-union employees at the same work site benefitted from union bargaining.

Rolling Back Women’s Reproductive Rights

The blow against women came in an Obamacare case, where the five conservative justices held that private employers do not have to include contraceptive coverage in employee health plans if the business owners’ religion is opposed to abortion-related services. The ruling, Burdell v. Hobby Lobby [3], which dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called “extreme” in her comments from the bench and dissent, also affirmed that corporations—not just individuals—possess religious rights and freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

“We must decide whether the challenged HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] regulations substantially burden the exercise of religion, and we hold that they do,” wrote [3] Justice Samual Alito for the majority. “Government action that imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise must serve a compelling government interest, and we assume that the HHS regulations satisfy this requirement. But in order for the HHS mandate to be sustained, it must also constitute the least restrictive means of serving that interest, and the mandate plainly fails that test.”

In other words, Alito said that the part of Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, that requires private employers to provide contraception was too strict. The law exempted religious non-profit organizations—such as Catholic hospitals—that believe birth control is against their beliefs. But that distinction, which treated non-profits differently than private corporations, did not suffice for conservatives who upped the rhetorical ante and argued that anything requiring birth control violated their religious liberty.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing a lengthy minority opinion dissent joined by all the Court’s women justices and Justice Stephen Breyer, was flabbergasted by the right-wingers’ reasoning and historic expansion of corporate constitutional rights under the guise of religious freedom.

“In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs,” her dissent began. “The exemption sought by [Christian businesses] Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would override significant interests of the corporations’ employees and covered dependents. It would deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage that the ACA would otherwise secure.”

Reactions to the decision were immediate. The liberal People for the American Way said, in an e-mail blast, “The Supreme Court just ruled 5-4 that CORPORATIONS have a ‘religious’ right to discriminate against their employees.” The right-wing Independent Women’s Forum said, “This ruling is a victory for anyone who believes in limited government and freedom of conscience rights or religious liberty.”

“Today’s decision not only deprives women of comprehensive healthcare, but it sets a terrifying standard in affirming the “personhood” of corporations. In siding with Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court yet again affirms the personhood of corporations, giving closely-held (i.e. limited number of stockholders) corporations so-called religious liberty and taking religious freedom away from their employees at the expense of women’s health,” said Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal. “This sets a dangerous precedent for the future of religious liberty and women’s rights.”

The ruling comes from several anti-Obamacarre lawsuits filed by conservatives that were consolidated into one case. Two prominent lawsuits brought against Obamacare’s birth control mandate had been dismissed [4] by lower federal circuit courts, but that didn’t stopped Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based crafts supply chain, from filing their own challenge. When another lower federal court sided with Hobby Lobby, that conflict among different federal circuits pushed the case to the Supreme Court.

Hobby Lobby is a large chain of craft stores owned by conservative evangelical Christians. It sued in federal court [5], claiming they should have the right to deny coverage for emergency contraception to over 13,000 employees in 40 states. Its owners, the Green family, claim [5] that Obamacare’s requirement to provide employer-based coverage for contraceptive service violates freedom of religion and speech.

The lawyers carrying the Greens case went further than just raising religious objections. They also cited some of the factually mistaken arguments seen in other anti-abortion fights, referring to emergency contraception as an “abortion-causing drug.” Morning-after pills do not end a pregnancy, but act as daily birth control pills do [6] to prevent fertilization from occurring.

President Obama defended the law’s birth control provision, saying “it is not fair [7]” for religious employers to deny access to contraceptive services to their non-religious employees. In response to Monday’s ruling, it is possible that the White House will seek to create an administrative rule that would cover the cost of contraception denied by these religious employers, lawyers following the case said.

But the issue here is larger than just religious objections to Obamacare. The precedent, as Justice Ginsburg noted, that a corporation can assert religious freedom rights under the First Amendment opens a Pandora’s box of possible resistance to other federal mandates.

UCLA Law School’s Adam Winkler, writing at Huffington Post, said [8] that corporate religious rights under the First Amendment are now more powerful than individual rights of privacy, and asked which issue, after women’s access to contraception, would be targeted by the religious right?

“LGBT people may be next,” he wrote [8]. “Remember a few months ago when Arizona almost adopted a controversial law that would have given business corporations a broad right to use religion to make claims for exemptions from the law? That proposed law was rightly seen as an attack on LGBT rights, as supporters insisted that business owners who object to same-sex marriage shouldn’t be forced to bake cakes, take pictures, or arrange the flowers at such ceremonies. After Hobby Lobby, now all business corporations have a right under federal law to claim religious-based exemptions to all sorts of laws.”

The ruling is the second time that the Court’s so-called conservatives have issued rulings seeking to undercut Obamacare. Its prior ruling that states do not have to expand their Medicaid programs, which offer health care to the poor, has left millions of low-income Americans without preventative health coverage—as opposed to visiting emergency rooms in crises.

The Court’s Sweeping Anti-Labor Ruling

The Court also vastly undercut the political power of public-sector unions on Monday, with the same block of justices limiting which government employees must pay union dues, cutting into unions’ operating funds for lobbying and other political activities. The case, Harris v. Quinn [9], concerned the constitutionality of “agency fees,” which are charged by these unions to all workers in a unionized setting, even non-union members. The rationale is those workers are benefitting from gains won in union-led contract talks.

Here, too, the right-wing majority cited a First Amendment rationale to undermine union organizing.

“This case presents the question whether the First Amendment permits a State to compel personal care providers to subsidize speech on matters of public concern by a union that they do not wish to join or support. We hold that it does not,” Alito, writing for the Court’s five-member, held. “If we accepted Illinois’ argument, we would approve an unprecedented violation of the bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing the dissent, called the majority opinion blatantly political, because the Court had previously upheld the union dues requirement when the funds were used for employment contracts—not lobbying or political advocacy. “The Court upheld the requirement so long as the union was using the money for “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment,” rather than for political or ideological activities.”

For years, Republicans in many states have tried to undermine the financing of unions’ ability to lobby and electioneer by seeking other avenues to undercut union dues. States like California have seen numerous so-called “paycheck protection measures” sponsored by the business sector appear as ballot initiatives, though they are almost always voted down by the state’s electorate. The ruling in Harris v. Quinn may achieve what these ballot measures failed to do: shrink union dues because there’s always a portion of workers who don’t want to pay these union fees, even if reaping the benefits of union advocacy.

The case began with home health care workers in Illinois paid under the state’s Medicaid program, which covers health care for the poor. In 2003, then Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich issued an executive order allowing the Service Employees International Union to exclusively representing the state’s home health workers. In 2009, his successor, Democratic Governor Pat Quinn issued another executive order classifying home care providers as state workers, making them eligible for union representation. A year later, a group of home health workers, led by Pamela Harris, brought a class-action lawsuit claiming that the SEIU’s collective bargaining agreement that required non-union members to pay union fees violated their First Amendment rights.

It’s important to emphasize that this ruling also is anti-women. Not only are a majority of SEIU’s 2.1 million members women working in low-wage jobs—like home health care, but the political agenda of unions like SEIU for these workers was focused on many issues that deeply affect low-income families. These include raising the minimum wage, ensuring sick pay, and benefits like health care. The GOP’s libertarians have long seen government-paid unionized employees as one of the labor movement’s remaining bastions of strength.

SIEU officials reacted with defiance, issuing a statement saying their political efforts would not be silenced.

“No court case is going to stand in the way of home care workers coming together to have a strong voice for good jobs and quality home care,” said[10] SEIU President Mary Kay Henry. “At a time when wages remain stagnant and income inequality is out of control, joining together in a union is the only proven way home care workers have of improving their lives and the lives of the people they care for.”

But labor officials have long feared the implications of this kind of ruling. That’s because it could make Democrats more reliant on Wall Street money for their campaigns than on their traditional allies in unions, which contribute both money and volunteer manpower.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/labor/doing-radical-rights-dirty-work-supreme-courts-latest-blows-against-women-and-unions

US Supreme Court attacks First Amendment, workers’ rights

The “Hobby Lobby” contraception ruling

Rightwingers and religious people like these pathetic seniors inhabit a fear universe crammed with lies. The utterly ridiculous idea that religious freedom is in danger in America is one such lie they buy.

By John Burton and Barry Grey, wsws.org
“The cowardice and duplicity of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party have played a critical role in enabling the court to impose this ruling…”

[T]he United States Supreme Court ended its October 2013 term with a 5-4 ruling allowing private corporations to deny their workers insurance for birth control, coverage otherwise required under the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), as long as the corporate owners claim their religious beliefs oppose contraception.

The thoroughly reactionary ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby infringes on the access of workers to health care while boosting Christian fundamentalism in breach of the prohibition against the establishment of religion, spelled out in the first sentence of the First Amendment of the US Constitution (the first of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights).

Hobby Lobby’s owners David and Barbara Green. It’s just so convenient that their religion also saves them money.

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., a retail chain with 600 locations and over 13,000 employees owned by multibillionaire evangelical Christian David Green, and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation, a cabinetmaker that employs 950 people and is owned by Mennonite Christians, filed separate lawsuits consolidated for review in the Supreme Court.

Both companies asked for an injunction exempting them from enforcement of the so-called “contraception mandate,” the ACA provision requiring that birth control coverage be included in employee health plans.

The consequences of a lack of birth control coverage can be significant. Birth control medications can cost $45 per dose, and an intrauterine device (IUD), which is among the most reliable and safe forms of contraception, can cost more than $1,000, including the office visit and insertion, a sum equal to a month’s full-time pay for a worker earning the minimum wage.

Demonstrators protesting the Court's abject decision.

Another example how religion can so easily fog the mind.

Yet that is precisely what the Supreme Court has now sanctioned.

There are almost 50 other private businesses that have sued the Obama administration seeking similar exemptions. Many assert a blanket objection to all forms of contraception, not just supposed abortifacients.

Moreover, there is nothing in principle to prevent employers from citing Monday’s ruling to oppose providing funding for other medical procedures for workers, such as vaccinations and blood transfusions, or using “freedom of religious expression” to justify refusing to hire African Americans, Muslims, Jews or gays.

The cowardice and duplicity of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party have played a critical role in enabling the court to impose this ruling. While claiming to defend abortion rights and the right of women to have access to birth control, the Obama White House has at every step caved in to right-wing attacks on the contraception provisions of the ACA from religious groups.

In 2012, Obama backed down when the Catholic Church and other organizations balked at Christian-affiliated hospitals and other nonprofits honoring the birth control mandate of Obamacare. Instead of upholding the law and the First Amendment separation of church and state, Obama changed the ACA to accommodate the right-wing religious attackers. He allowed these groups to avoid paying for such coverage for female employees, and instead required insurance firms to do so, ultimately at taxpayer expense.

In oral arguments before the court last March, Alito directly asked the administration’s solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, whether the Obama administration was claiming that a ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties would impact the First Amendment’s ban on any establishment of religion by the state. Verrilli answered that the administration was not making such a claim.

In his ruling, Alito seized on these efforts by the White House to appease the Christian right and built his argument around them. He began by adopting the unprecedented position that for-profit, private corporations, as “persons” in the eyes of the law, could assert religious interests and were therefore covered by the RFRA.

He then cited the Obama administration’s 2012 capitulation to right-wing and religious forces on the birth control issue. Since the Obama administration “has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations,” Alito wrote, there is “no reason why the same system cannot be made available when the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.”

In other words, Obama should simply extend his exemption for religion-based nonprofits to closely held private corporations such as Hobby Lobby and Conestoga that assert similar objections.

The effect of this would be to expand the public, taxpayer subsidy to employers to accommodate the owners’ asserted religious beliefs—a clear violation of the First Amendment ban on the establishment of religion.

Moreover, the Supreme Court’s proposed expanded opt-out rule would encourage businesses to lodge objections to contraception on religious ground. Companies that did so could thereby lower their premiums on health plans relative to employers that complied with all of the ACA’s requirements, thus increasing profits and gaining a competitive edge.

Nor is there any guarantee that Alito’s proposal that the Obama administration expand its contraception subsidy program to private companies would actually be enacted and, if so, would survive the inevitable right-wing political and legal challenges.

Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a lengthy dissent and took the unusual step of reading it from the bench. She called the majority’s ruling one “of startling breadth,” which “holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

According to Ginsburg, the majority’s ruling “demands accommodation of a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs no matter the impact that accommodation may have on third parties who do not share the corporation owners’ religious faith–in these cases, thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga or dependents of persons those corporations employ.”

In other words, the supposed free exercise of religion for billionaire Hobby Lobby owner David Green means the “freedom” to impose his personal religious views and practices on the intimate lives of workers and their families, who must depend on employer-funded plans for their health needs.

As explained by Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “For the first time, the highest court in the country has said that business owners can use their religious beliefs to deny their employees a benefit that they are guaranteed by law.”

Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Ginsburg’s dissent, Breyer and Kagan parting ways only on Ginsburg’s assertion that “the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities” such as the corporations.

The four so-called “liberals” on the court, while in agreement that the contraception mandate does not impose an undue burden on the free exercise of religion by corporate owners, like the White House did not defend the coverage on First Amendment grounds. In her decision, Ginsburg relegated the establishment clause of the First Amendment to a footnote, stating meekly that “the government’s license to grant religion-based exemptions from generally applicable laws is constrained by the establishment clause.”

Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby Debacle

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

[T]he Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has struck another major blow against women and Obamacare, ruling on Monday that private employers do not have to include contraceptive coverage in employee health plans if the business owners’ religion is opposed to abortion-related services. The ruling, which dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called “extreme” in comments from the bench, affirmed that corporations—not just individuals—possess religious rights and freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

“We must decide whether the challenged HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] regulations substantially burden the exercise of religion, and we hold that they do,” wrote Justice Samual Alito, writing for the 5-4 majority. “Government action that imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise must serve a compelling government interest, and we assume that the HHS regulations satisfy this requirement. But in order for the HHS mandate to be sustained, it must also constitute the least restrictive means of serving that interest, and the mandate plainly fails that test.”

The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, requires private employers to provide contraception but it exempted religious non-profit organizations—like Catholic hospitals—that believe birth control is against their beliefs. That did not suffice for conservatives who said that the law violated their religious liberty.

“In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs,” Justice Ginsburg said in her dissent joined by all the Court’s women justices and Justice Stephen Breyer. “The exemption sought by [Christian businesses] Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would override significant interests of the corporations’ employees and covered dependents. It would deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage that the ACA would otherwise secure.”

Reactions to the decision were immediate. The liberal People for the American Way said, in an e-mail blast, “The Supreme Court just ruled 5-4 that CORPORATIONS have a “religious” right to discriminate against their employees.” The right-wing Independent Women’s Forum said, “This ruling is a victory for anyone who believes in limited government and freedom of conscience rights or religious liberty.

“Today’s decision not only deprives women of comprehensive healthcare, but it sets a terrifying standard in affirming the ‘personhood’ of corporations. In siding with Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court yet again affirms the personhood of corporations, giving closely-held (i.e. limited number of stockholders) corporations so-called religious liberty and taking religious freedom away from their employees at the expense of women’s health,” said Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal. “This sets a dangerous precedent for the future of religious liberty and women’s rights.”

The Court’s ruling comes from several lawsuits filed by conservatives that were consolidated into one case.

Two prominent lawsuits brought against Obamacare’s birth control mandate had been dismissed [3], but that didn’t stop Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based crafts supply chain, from filing their own challenge.

Hobby Lobby is a large chain of craft stores owned by conservative evangelical Christians. It sued in federal court [4], claiming it should have the right to deny coverage for emergency contraception to over 13,000 employees in 40 states. Its owners, the Green family, claim [4] that Obamacare’s requirement to provide employer-based coverage for contraceptive service violated freedom of religion and speech.

The lawyers carrying the Greens case went further than just raise religious objections. They also cited some of the factually mistaken arguments seen in other anti-abortion fights, referring to emergency contraception as an “abortion-causing drug.” Morning-after pills do not end a pregnancy, but act as daily birth control pills do [5] to prevent fertilization from occurring.

President Obama defended the law’s birth control provision, saying “it is not fair [6]” for religious employers to deny access to contraceptive services to their non-religious employees. In response to Monday’s ruling, it is possible that the White House will seek to create an administrative rule that would cover the cost of contraception denied by these religious employers, lawyers following the case said.

UCLA Law School’s Adam Winkler, writing in the Huffington Post, said [7] that corporate religious rights under the First Amendment are now more powerful than individual rights of privacy, and asked aloud, which target, after women’s access to contraception, would be targeted by the religious right?

“LGBT people may be next,” he wrote [7]. “Remember a few months ago when Arizona almost adopted a controversial law that would have given business corporations a broad right to use religion to make claims for exemptions from the law? That proposed law was rightly seen as an attack on LGBT rights, as supporters insisted that business owners who object to same-sex marriage shouldn’t be forced to bake cakes, take pictures, or arrange the flowers at such ceremonies. After Hobby Lobby, now all business corporations have a right under federal law to claim religious-based exemptions to all sorts of laws.”

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/supreme-courts-hobby-lobby-debacle