I asked a similar question in another thread, but I’m curious: do readers of this dialog understand the difference between Richard Parker’s cogent attacks on the precise weakest part of my argument, and Shayna’s incoherent babble? Do people realize that I am having trouble completely refuting what RP says, and easily refuting what Shayna says?
Or does it all seem like the same thing is going on? They say something, I say something, and the person that’s doing well is the person whose position you agree with?
Why? The Dictionary Act says “person=corporation;” the RFRA says persons whose religious exercise is burdened are covered. Why must an extra-textual analysis answer “Can corporations have religious exercise rights,” when the statutes (read together) say they can?
The opinion DID employ an extra-textual analysis. I concede that point.
Because the threshold question is whether the Court should apply the Dictionary Act. And that question is answered, as a matter of settled law, by asking whether the Dictionary Act definition makes sense in the context of the other statute. Necessarily, then, the Court must decide for itself whether it makes sense to say corporations have religious beliefs.
I think Alito makes a good and ultimately more persuasive argument for why they do. Ginsburg makes some counter-arguments. Neither of them are more or less textual than the other.
Thought experiment, then: what kind of text could Congress have possibly employed to avoid this analysis, and definitively say that corporations have religious exercise rights?
Among the many ways, they could have defined “religious practices” in such a way as to make clear that it applies to the practices of a corporation and the beliefs of its owners.
To drive home the point, consider a statute that says this (ignoring that this would be a criminal prohibition subject to different rules of interpretation):
“If a person steals, the government shall cut of the person’s hand.”
If Hobby Lobby has a policy of taking little old lady’s purses, do we cut off the hand(s) of the owner(s)? How would you answer that question relying solely on the text of that statute and the Dictionary Act?
You might say that corporations don’t have hands, but of course they don’t have beliefs either. They have hands in exactly the same sense that they have beliefs. So would the law apply?
Or, in the entirety of the legislative history, the debates, or the enactment itself, someone, ANYONE, could have said it covers for-profit corporations. Which, as Ginsburg points out, is very indicative that the imagined reading of RFRA by the majority is out of line of the legislative intent.
It’s funny how the ignoring of the legislative intent in favor of the text of the document is exactly the argument Bricker would be making to disparage the idea that the 14th Amendment covers sexual preference or the due process clause covers sodomy. Funny how that argument doesn’t matter in this context.
I’ve noticed that you keep talking about “beliefs,” and I keep saying “exercise of religion.” This was highlighted as I started to frame my answer about the lack of corporate hands to cut off.
The RFRA says:
So does it help to point out that, at least with respect to the RFRA itself, the issue is not whether corporations can have religious beliefs, but whether they can exercise religion.
So with that in mind, i can more easily answer you: no, they don’t have hands at all, but they certainly can exercise religion.
It’s just obvious to you, without further argument, that a corporation can “exercise religion?” Really?
I guess I don’t really have a rebuttal to that, except to say that I think it isn’t obvious on its face to most Americans. It may well be the reasoned conclusion we reach after examining the question closely (i.e., using reason and making judgments), but I just find it really hard to understand how you think it’s obviously true on its face.
So…if a Congressman, on the eve of voting for the RFRA, had said, “You know, by the terms of the Dictionary Act, this includes all corporations,” then you’d be on the opposite side of the question?
When the text is clear, the text suffices. The clear text of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids denying to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws – read literally, that forbids virtually any classification that treats people differently. There has to be some recourse there to an external source, I admit, because the text alone is insufficient. But the RFRA/Dictionary Act pair suffers no such infirmity.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore is a corporation. When I think of that, then yes, it’s obvious to me that a corporation can exercise religion. And I think most Americans, when reminded that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore is a corporation, just like their own church probably is, would readily agree that corporations can exercise religion.
Frankly, to expand on this, I think Hamlet’s sticking point is probably where most Americans would have trouble: they’d readily accept a non-profit’s exercise of religion, but might have more trouble with a for-profit corporation claiming to exercise religion.
I disagree, but there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. I think most people would concede that reasonable people could disagree over whether a church can be said to “exercise religion” and that it depends on the context. A church cannot pray. It cannot be saved. No one would call McDonald’s an atheist.
But I at least understand where you’re coming from if your mind finds no linguistic tension in saying that a church is exercising religion. If, on your reading, this is as simple as a statute that referred to “assets” or something else that obviously applies to corporation, then I see how you could believe it is solely textual.
That said, I do think your position is even more radical than the Court’s. Alito at least acknowledges that it may not be sensible to apply RFRA to all corporations. Do you think limiting the opinion to closely-held corporations can be justified by the text of RFRA?
Suppose a company, say Hoppy Loppy - fine purveyors of gardening equipment used to harvest hops for the beer industry - decides to not pay its employees the wages which are due. The employee goes to court, sues and, and wins a judgment. The employee uses legal means to enforce that judgement. The employee is entitled to those wages.
Suppose another company, say Lorry Holly - fine purveyors of Christmas decorations for semi trucks - decides to drop its health insurance for all employees. Absent a contract to the contrary an employee is just plain out of luck. They cannot compel the payment of insurance. Sure, the employee could sue but there is no chance of winning. Sure the company may now be required to pay [del]tax penalties[/del] a shared responsibility payment but those [del]penalties[/del] payments go to the federal government, not the employee.
Many retirees have found out that absent a specific promise, their former company can legally eliminate their retiree health benefits. And it istotally legalunder federal law. But surely that employee worked for and earned those benefits! Well, he is not legally entitled to them absent a specific promise to the contrary.
I think it is an almost inevitable consequence of the form, though – I think the more stockholders there are, the more seats on the board there are, the more dissenting opinions about religion will exist. But there’s nothing in the text of the RFRA that limits its effects to closely-held companies.
This is not accurate, and since is the Pit I’ll go ahead and say you know it and are deliberately trying to deceive people into thinking that the Pentagon Papers case invoked the same clause of the law that Hobby Lobby successfully exploited.
](New York Times Co. v. United States - Wikipedia)
That case was decided in favor of the NYT because the press is explicitly given 1st Amendment rights, not because the NYT was a corporation and thus, under the Dictionary Act, a person deserving 1st Amendment rights.
What an utterly craven, immoral thing you did there: lying under the guise of authority in order to further your own political agenda. I thought you thought you were better than that, Bricker. I’m not sure why I thought that, given your past, but there it is.
(back when **Bricker **was talking about corporations exercising religion - easier to identify than corporations having religious beliefs) But, if I understand things, there’s a test the court applies regarding the sincerity of the corporation in exercising religion.
That is a test of the corporation’s religious belief, isn’t it? It’s not enough to observe what the corporation does, we have to get into its mind and know what its true intent is.
[del]Also, I don’t think you’ve addressed why this should apply to closely held corporations and not to private, but not closely held, or publicly traded corporations. Can’t stockholders vote on the corporation’s religious beliefs and codify them?[/del]Now you have. And that’s the most troubling part to me. This ruling applies to these special snowflakes, but not these, but we didn’t say why.
And you’re correct… other than the additional fact that Hobby Lobby has in the past invested in the very birth control companies it “has issues” with now.