And it should be noted that this ruling would almost certainly not apply to public companies. Only companies where the owners are in charge. Microsoft cannot claim religious objections to anything. But an owner of a comic book store certainly can. Otherwise, you’re saying that people have to choose between their faith and making a living. Religious people need not go into business for themselves. That is reserved for non-believers only.
Hobby Lobby isn’t arguing against the penalties - they are arguing the law’s requirements infringe their rights. If the status quo stands and they choose not to provide insurance, they will be subject to penalties just like any other business, Muslim or Christian or whatever.
This is what employers did before the ACA. Hobby Lobby is challenging this aspect of the ACA. Of course it’s the law of the land - the ACA passed and was signed into law. At least state their position fairly. This case is challenging the law, not arguing they shouldn’t be subject to it. Saying that providing contraceptive coverage as part of the health care package is the law is accurate - but not very informative. That’s a given seeing as how that is the law being challenged.
Shame we don’t give for-profit corporations lawmaking power, then isn’t it. Or is Hobby Lobby a Martin Luther King Jr. figure, using civil disobedience to fight an evil system?
Until my views are law, I don’t think they matter all that much to Hobby Lobby.
Although I am intrigued to know if you are as upset that those tithes of yours go to pay for the life long support of clergy who molested children and the powers that be that shifted them around parishes, or that the health insurance payments to whatever large insurance company you use get used for abortions, or that your tax money is used to kill innocent people.
This fiction that somehow paying an insurance company for health insurance of a worker is somehow supporting everything that that insurance company pays for is just that, a fiction.
It can. There are corporations that I do think have religious duties. Many of the non-profit groups that the RFRA was enacted to protect (note: again, non-profit, not the for profit ones), may very well have religious duties.
But you don’t get to claim a religious duty when you decide to make your association for-profit. When you decide to join the for-profits corporations, you subject yourself to the rules of that game. I would have absolutely no problem with Mr. Green deciding his made up objection to paying for certain kinds of contraception was a vital part of his non-profit, pro-arts and crafts company. But when he instead makes massive amounts of money thanks to the protections and laws surrounding for-profit corporations, well, then his complaints of religious persecution ring awfully hollow.
Why not? If 50% of shareholders agree that it is immoral for Microsoft to pay for blood transfusions, why shouldn’t they be able to claim religious objections? Where is this line of yours drawn? Majority owners? S Corporations? 1,000,000 outstanding shares? Do you want the judiciary deciding which for profit companies are entitled to religious objections and which aren’t, and which of those religious objections are legitimate and which are not? How do you imagine this recognition of for-profit religious objections works from here on out?
Except it would only apply to those things that the law says you have to provide. The whole point of this is that healthcare insurance is something that a workplace of sufficient size must provide under the PPACA. Hobby Lobby doesn’t want to provide one of the requirements for that insurance. No one is challenging any form of compensation that is optional.
If this is declared constitutional, no workplace has the option of providing money instead of healthcare, unless they want to pay the fine. I don’t see how what you care about can happen under the current law.
Well, the government’s lawyer conceded that in a certain hypothetical that a for-profit corporation could assert a religious practice claim. Indeed not permitting a religious liberty claim in that circumstance would leave the for-profit corporation without a legal grounds to access the court.
The government’s lawyer tried to argue that perhaps the customers could have standing to make a claim. Of course the SCOTUS didn’t look too fondly on other persons stepping in in a rather important recent case from California. 
So since the government side has surrendered on that point it is perhaps best to try to hang your argument on what is left.
Then shouldn’t the ACA penalties also count, since they were declared to be exercises of Congress’s taxing power?
I was surprised that some of the justices seemed to be willing extend corporate personhood to include religious beliefs in some cases. As I pointed out earlier, I’m concerned that the Court will decide that some for profit corporations, those closely held or non-public, can indeed raise their very own religious objections (although I still don’t understand why the butchers in Breyer’s hypothetical couldn’t bring it to court themselves). I think it is much better reasoned to deal with the religious objections of the decisionmakers themselves, and not the corporation, than it is to create a fiction that corporations have religious duties.
If I was the private owner of Dracula Tent Peg, Inc. and found out that the US Army was using my tent pegs to go around staking Romanian vampires to death, I’d certainly stop selling my stakes to the army. If the government then attempted to force the issue somehow, I would use the RFRA as my defense in front of the Supreme Court. I think I’d have a strong case and would probably win it.
Bullshit.
I don’t think the Supreme Court believes in vampires.
Yes, some of the Justices did…but more to the point, the Solicitor General conceded the point as well.
Because the states that allowed these entities to adopt the corporate form did not anticipate that individual liberties would be extended to things which are clearly not individuals?
Why shouldn’t the Second Amendment apply to corporations? The Seventh? The Fifth (as noted above)?
Only applied to the individual mandate. Congress obviously has Commerce Clause power on penalizing corporations for not offering sufficient health coverage (heck, that’s the basis behind HIPAA).
If I have a religious objection to war, does this mean I cannot be compelled to pay taxes that support it?
It seems to me that in the hypothetical ‘for profit’ business of butchering - where there is a specific skill and market - that the religous aspect of it not only drives the need and market, but the core of the business itself.
Not so much when it comes to an arts and crafts store whose market is generic, that doesn’t have a requirement around the faith of its employees or customers, that doesn’t market its wares to a specific religious faith.
From the transcript:
*"JUSTICE BREYER: I mean, the point that Justice Alito was making is that take five Jewish or Muslim butchers and what you’re saying to them is if they choose to work under the corporate form, which is viewed universally, you have to give up on that form the Freedom of Exercise Clause that you’d otherwise have. Now, looked at that way, I don’t think it matters whether they call themselves a corporation or whether they call themselves individuals. I mean, I think that’s the question you’re being asked, and I need to know what your response is to it.
GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I think our response is what the Court said in Part 3 of the Lee opinion, which is that once you make a choice to go into the commercial sphere, which you certainly do when you incorporate as a for profit corporation, you are making a choice to live by the rules that govern you and your competitors in the commercial sphere."*
Now I may not be a big city lawyer, but that’s not conceding the point. I couldn’t find anywhere in the transcript where Verrilli concedes that for profit corporations have religious duties that they can sin against. The closest he comes is perhaps allowing a corporation to sue on behalf of its customers, but that’s not the same thing.
Maybe you can show me where he conceded for profit corporations can exercise religion.
Sure:
JUSTICE ALITO: What about the implications of saying that no for-profit corporation can raise any sort of free exercise claim at all and nobody associated with the for-profit corporation can raise any sort of free exercise claim at all?
Let me give you this example. According to the media, Denmark recently prohibited kosher and halal slaughter methods because they believe that they are inhumane. Now, suppose Congress enacted something like that here. What would the – what would a corporation that is a kosher or halal slaughterhouse do? They would simply – they would have no recourse whatsoever. They couldn’t even get a day in court. They couldn’t raise a RFRA claim. They couldn’t raise a First Amendment claim.
GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I’m not sure they couldn’t raise a First Amendment claim, Justice Alito. I think if you had a targeted law like that, that targeted a specific religious practice, that – I don’t think it is our position that they couldn’t make a free exercise claim in that circumstance. . .
It’s true that he goes on - after having been saved by Justice Kennedy - to then hypothesize that the companies would have standing on behalf of the customers. . . . which is an iffy Article III approach.
But he certainly concedes that corporations would, in that kind of targeted law, have standing, no matter how derived, to assert a First Amendment religious claim. Yes?
Well, the corporation is asserting a right under the RFRA, which is not applicable against the states, per City of Boerne v. Flores. But to the extent that the states have to recognize religious claims by corporations, they knew, or should have known, that corporate entities are players in interstate commerce, and so they knew, or should have known, that Congress gets a major voice in what they can do or not do.
I can’t think of too many factual situations in which the Second Amendment would be in contention as to corporations, but I’d say it’s generally applicable. The Seventh is absolutely applicable, to the extent it’s applicable to anyone. And yes, absolutely the Fifth.
No. Because they aren’t asserting their own First Amendment claim, they’re asserting it on behalf of the customers. He specifically says:
"GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I think in that circumstance, you would have, I think, an ability for customers to bring suit. I think you might recognize third party standing on behalf of the corporation on the corporations, on behalf of customers. So a suit like that could be brought.
Then, after that, is when he further clarifies and says, as I quoted above:
“GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I think our response is what the Court said in Part 3 of the Lee opinion, which is that once you make a choice to go into the commercial sphere, which you certainly do when you incorporate as a for profit corporation, you are making a choice to live by the rules that govern you and your competitors in the commercial sphere.”
So, no, your assertion that they somehow conceded that a corporation has its own religious exercise is patently false. He specifically says that they may be able to assert it on behalf of their customers, but very definitively says the for-profit corporation doesn’t have free exercise on its own.
Want to try again?