I wouldn’t expect them not to use the same bank, the same suppliers, the same roads and air as those companies. I would however, expect them not to invest in those companies.
Why would you expect that your judgement on the matter is the one they should adopt?
If they want to publicly argue that they shouldn’t be “forced” to to pay for insurance that “may” be used for objectionable birth control methods, then the fact that they have no qualms investing money in firms that make those things does tend to point to a certain amount of hypocrisy. If I was a judge on the case, it would certainly lower my opinion of the value of their claims about their so-called moral and religious beliefs.
Just as if someone made a claim about objecting to paying for employee insurance that could provide methadone treatment, while at the same time they had money invested in a methadone manufacturing company.
Guys, this whole question of whether Hobby Lobby is “sincere” is a canard. For one, SCOTUS is bound by the trial court’s finding that their belief is sincere. More significantly, there will always be another plaintiff that doesn’t invest in drug companies, so this distinction is ultimately meaningless.
Why is “may” in quotes? They have no problem paying for insurance that won’t be used for abortion-related birth control. They don’t object to providing insurance to meet every single standard of Obamacare, except for contraception that has the effect to killing a fertilized embryo. They don’t object to contraception, even – just the specific types of contraception that can have that effect: RU-486, IUDs, Ella, and Plan B. There are 20 different kinds of contraception therapies offered under their insurance; they object only to those four.
But they are not directly investing. They hire a company to run the 401(K). That company buys mutual funds. Each mutual fund invests in hundreds of different companies. Among those hundreds are the company that makes RU-486. Don’t you think that’s more attentuated than “investing in them?”
Above I gave the example of the Jewish practice of mechirah, the selling of chametz before Passover to a non-Jew to comply with the commandment that Jews not own chametz during passover, and then buying back after passover in a noon-binding but well-understood deal.
In Israel, the government appoints the Chief Rabbinate as its agent. Every year, the Chief Rabbinate sells a hundred million dollars worth of grain to the same hotel owner for a tiny deposit, and buys it back at the same price (returning his deposit) after Passover.
Are they insincere?
Of course they are, but that’s beside the point.
Are we now foreclosed from discussing things other than the legalities. Is the conclusion that Hobby Lobby is concerned about their “sincerely held religious beliefs” only some of the time not relevant to the overall discussion of how these things should be handled.
This thread is about the legalities. There’s a Pit thread on the same topic for discussing how HL is full of shit.
I know this is a popular response, but I think you’re incredibly naive if you think that there aren’t dozens of corporations out there that will take a ruling for Hobby Lobby and extend it to contraception itself. Unless you have some relevant distinction between the two, isn’t it patently obvious that the ruling would soon apply to contraception too?
No more so than Hobby Lobby hiring a company to handle the health insurance for their workers.
I responded in the other thread, maybe you can deal with it here: "Why don’t you answer it? You seem to be advocating for a massive expansion of the right to free exercise to include for-profit corporations, why don’t you tell me? But instead of a Jewish person, let’s make it a massive corporation. They decide that, for Passover, they’ll divest themselves of massive amounts of “chametz” to another corporation, and then buy it back afterwards. But they go to court to argue that any taxes on those transactions violates the corporation’s sincerely held religious beliefs. Or, in selling their chametz, they will sell only to Non-Jewish corporations, thereby excluding all Jewish people from buying their chametz, which, I think we can agree, is not a good thing. Or they decide that throwing all their chametz out in the ocean is proper disposal of the chametz, but environmental laws won’t let them, so the laws violate the corporations’ religious liberties? Or 51% of shareholders want to sell, 49% don’t, so they enter a contract, but the next year, it’s a different split, and they don’t want to sell, so the contract enforcement violates their sincerely held religious beliefs. What then?
You’re the one advocating to have the judicial system involved in many more cases like the hypothetical one you have. You should be the one to answer them."
Cite please, showing that those four types of contraception have “the effect to killing a fertilized embryo”?
Before I cite specifics, do you acknowledge there is such a concept as killing a fertilized embryo?
In other words, I don’t want to waste time showing how the IUD prevents a fertilized embryo from implanting, only to have you say that this isn’t “killing.”
Because it isn’t necessarily a given that it will be used for that purpose.
The portion of my post that you erased answered that objection:
They only object to the specific provisions of the law require coverage of RU-486, Ella, Plan B, and IUDs. Do you believe that it’s not a given that those four won’t be used for objectionable birth control methods?
I thought the whole thing about Plan B and Ella was that they didn’t prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. . .that early studies suggested they might, but those were later debunked as further studies were done. So, while some people still have that belief, it’s not accurate. Am I wrong?
There are two responses.
The first is that Hobby Lobby excludes those four because they believe Plan B and Ella can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg – undoubtedly because of those early studies. So they based their decision on those early studies, which could not definitively determine the mechanism in play. Newer information may well cause them to review their objections.
The second response is that so far as I can determine, recent studies have strongly suggested that Plan B does not inhibit implantation, but “Less, however, is known about ella, the other widely available emergency contraceptive. And that’s where the controversy continues to rage.” (quoting the link)
And as of right now, the Plan B package label still says:
So perhaps they are relying on Plan B’s own representation.
It’s my understanding that that warning was put on Plan B early on in the process when it wasn’t clear, and that Teva has a request in with the FCC to let them remove the warning label.
I guess that raises another question, which is, what happens if the sincere religious belief is based on false information…can a company still carve out a first amendment exemption to law. Like, lets go with an obvious and kind of absurd example here, but lets say a company doesn’t want its employees to participate in Obamacare because Obamacare sets up death panels, and it doesn’t believe that the government should kill old or handicapped people. Their belief is sincere…they really don’t believe that the government should go around murdering people, but their understanding of the facts are wrong, in that the law doesn’t actually do that.
That may well be the case – but I think it’s a bit unfair to demand that Hobby Lobby independently evaluate studies as opposed to accepting the judgement of the FDA. In other words, I have no idea what might be causing the FDA’s reticence in acting to allow the change, but you can hardly demand that Hobby Lobby second-guess the FDA.
I would say that as a general principle, claims that involve religious necessity have an untestable and a testable component. The government cannot challenge the proposition that God commands us to avoid meat on Fridays of Lent, but is certainly allowed to point out that “Friday,” occurs once per week, and if a claim involved, say, a prisoner who objected to meat served on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the Catholic belief concerning abstinence from meat would not help him.
This case is a bit murkier – since Hobby Lobby has no objection to other contraception methods, I expect that if it were definitively proved that Plan B did not prevent implantation, their objection to Plan B would vanish.
Of course, they aren’t Catholic; a Catholic-based company would not be swayed, because their objection is to artificial obstacles to conception, rather than merely objecting to abortion-like actions.
So having said all that…what would happen if a company obstinately persisted in a belief that was objectively, provably, and definitively wrong?
I’d say that ought to defeat their claim of sincere religious belief. But I caution that I picture the bar for that being a high and broadly constructed one.
As an analogy, the Jewish kosher rules forbid eating a cheeseburger. But they are based on a Scriptural admonition to avoid mixing the flesh of the kid with the milk of its mother. In today’s economy, it’s essentially certain that the cheese you eat did not come from the milk of the cow that birthed the cow who was butchered to provide the hamburger you’re eating.
But the rule goes beyond the Scriptural command – it is a gezeirah, a “fence around the Torah.” The rule is intended to ensure compliance with the Torah by prohibiting a wider range of conduct than the Scriptural text prevents. It forbids eating dairy with chicken meat, even though it’s utterly certain that the milk in the dairy did not come from the chicken’s mother.
So if the issue were a sincerely held religious belief in the kosher laws, that could not be defeated by showing that chickens don’t give milk; the actual belief does not derive only from the Torah rule but from the rabbinical fence around the Torah rule.
Interestingly enough (as an aside), the Catholic Church allows Plan B. The German Bishops, last year, announced that Catholic hospitals could give it to rape victims. This was after a case in 2012, when a Catholic clinic in Cologne refused to give it to a young woman who was drugged at a party and who suspected she had been raped.
This also shows why religious people should think for themselves, even though that probably makes the legal situation more confusing. I eat chicken with milk, because a) as you pointed out, chickens don’t give milk, and the law says, “do not boil a calf in its mothers’ milk”, and b) the Torah also says, “Do not add or subtract from this.”
Where the rabbis seem to be clearly wrong, I ignore rabbinical wisdom. Organized religion tends to prioritize tradition over what Scripture actually says. The no poultry with milk law was based on the fact that most Jews were ignorant and uneducated at the time and it was important not to confuse them. It survives despite Jews being about the best educated group on the planet because of tradition.
Yes – because the Catholic view permits contraception to be administered to a rape victim. The key element to understand for Catholics is whether Plan B actually has any abortifacient character. If, as studies are now showing, it does not, then it can be given to rape victims.
It would still not be permissible for use between married couples as birth control, though.