Unlikely. The precedent in First Amendment cases of this type is Employment Division v. Smith, which if applied cuts against Hobby Lobby. In fact, the RFRA was passed specifically to reverse the Court’s action in Employment Division.
And Scalia wrote it. Kennedy joined it.
What made you reach your conclusion, given those facts?
Smith was 25 years ago. Times have changed. The facts of the cases are sufficiently different, and these five justices are sufficiently partisan and/or ideological, that I’ll bet they could figure out a way to find for Hobby Lobby. Alito says in his HL decision that it only applies to contraception, not other religious beliefs such as vaccinations, so I’m guessing he could find a way to distinguish contraception coverage, which of course he opposes as a good Catholic, from illegal drug use.
Never underestimate the power of Alito to find a justification to rule in favor of a big business. Smith was one guy (or maybe two, I think there was someone else on the case with him). Hobby Lobby is a business. Alito is absolutely not going to rule against a business, and Scalia probably isn’t either.
I agree with this last sentiment. But I don’t see what limit they’d apply that doesn’t make this logic equally applicable to Jehovah’s Witness’ companies that don’t want to pay for blood transfusions. Congress opened that door with the plain text, they can close it. But I don’t see how SCOTUS can force this to be the narrow decision they describe it as. As I said, I think it was just a bit of political cowardice.
Yes, even if one finds a different argument more persuasive (I don’t), I don’t see how this decision could be described as “out of left field” or crazy or whatever. The legislation says what it says, not what some of us wished it did.
What does “BigT” refer to?
Well corporations are people, and people are people, and people have equality under the law, but clearly, some people are more equal than others – the corporate people.
Scalia DID rule against a business when he authored Employment Division.
So in your view, Scalia, the author of Employment Division, would reverse it?
A poster here.
If it opened a “legal floodgate” I’d be happy as a clam. The federal government is in a rush to ram its dirty fingers into every aspect of our lives while tossing our freedoms out the window. Almost anything which helps the American people fight back against that tendency is good thing in my book.
That said, the article you link to doesn’t really justify its title. In fact there’s absolutely no evidence to justify Evil Captor’s prediction that the Hobby Lobby decision will lead to any further lawsuits beyond the 70-odd ones already filed. Hence it’s not surprising that Evil Captor, as usual, provided no citation to back up his claims.
Are you under the impression that full-time salaried workers at closely-held companies are especially indigent?
The truly poor – those for whom the ~$25 a month for generic birth control is a real hardship – are 1) mostly hourly employees, and thus don’t have insurance to begin with, and 2) are covered by Medicaid.
I expect a brief spike in sales, because of the immense publicity.
But people will become bored in time, and pretty soon the levels will revert to normalcy. As opposed to, say, handguns, household hobbies are not meaningfully correlated with strong political opinions.
The parade of horribles seems to ignore a key part of the HL ruling… the specific rationale as to why the employer mandate to provide contraceptives is not the least restrictive means available.
There is not a pre-existing alternative system of providing blood transfusions as there is for contraception. A court could reasonably say that even though a requirement to pay for insurance including blood transfusions is an intrusion on a Jehovah’s Witness’ owned for-profit corporations sincerely held religious exercise, that the mandate stands as there is no less restrictive alternative.
The fact that the PPACA already created an exemption to the contraceptive mandate for certain corporations made it easy for SCOTUS to point to that as a less intrusive means.
Now, a future case might argue that the various government funded immunization programs at public health clinics might be a reasonable less-intrusive means of providing such services if an employer objects to such a mandate on religious grounds.
It isn’t a religious belief, it is a fact, at least sometimes. Anything that prevents a fertilized egg/zygote from implanting, as these contraceptives sometimes do, is causing an abortion.
Well, yes and no.
The OB/Gyn definition of an abortion is (generally) any treatment which causes an implanted embryo or fetus to be terminated.
The pro-life Christian definition is any treatment that causes a fertilized embryo to fail to implant, OR any treatment which causes an implanted embryo or fetus to be terminated.
This is an issue of semantics – whatever you choose to call preventing a fertilized egg from implanting is what they object to. The word “abortion” might confuse things when it’s used in slightly different ways.
Yup. The issue here is the HL (or its owners) had a religious objection to causing a a fertilised embryo to fail to implant, and objected to being compelled to provide for this. Whether “this” falls in or outside whatever definition of “abortion” you care to adopt doesn’t affect the position much, one way or the other.
I guess it doesn’t really matter now given that the court has since expanded its decision to include any and all forms of birth control.
Well, yes. There’s nothing in the Bill of Rights or the RFRA to say that free exercise applies to religious beliefs only about abortion, or only about birth control, or only about something else. The question for the SC is not “do we classify this as abortion, or birth control, or something else?”. It’s “is there a compelling public interest here which justifies Congress in requiring people to act in a way contrary to their religious convictions?”
The only reason HL are involved in this loop at all is to gratify the vested interests of health insurance companies whose financial well-being would be threatened by a more rational and effective system of healthcare provision. I don’t find that very compelling, myself. And neither, it seems, did the Supreme Court.
A pre-existing alternative certainly makes it less hypothetical, but it’s not required, right? So long as there is a practical, less-restrictive alternative we can contemplate–something reasonable and possible–then ISTM the parade continues.
You’re right, though, that the sky is not the limit.
It has certainly been said that in the United States you can sue for any reason at all. Whether you can win is a different matter entirely.
But no, the sky is not completely falling. For the RFRA to justify any sort of exemption it takes more that just someone’s religious claim. As **Bricker **has repeatedly noted in various threads, that claim must show (my paraphrasing here):
and if those criteria are met then the government has a burden to:
The courts have indeed turned down such claims for exemptions when they fail the test. I, for one, believe that they will continue to do so.
Certainly where the federal government already operates some sort of alternate program it will be difficult for them to demonstrate that forcing a person or corporation to do substantially the same thing in violation of a sincerely held belief is the least restrictive way of meeting the compelling state interest.
I agree. My main point was that I believe Alito’s assurances, that the decision really only applies to contraceptives, are not logical. Of course all such claims will have to overcome the same challenges. But I don’t see anything that would limit such claims to religious concerns over contraceptives.
I will believe this is not a bunch of Catholic men using the law to enable other Catholics to impose their religious values on the rest of us the day when a Muslim claim is upheld under RFRA.