I’m not a laywer, so take this with a boulder of salt (if I’m way off, hopefully one of the resident lawyers will post a correction)…that all said, my understanding is that the individual mandate was held to be a tax, as opposed to a regulation on commerce, because it compels commercial activity, which Congress doesn’t have the power to do.
The contraceptive mandate, on the other hand, is such a regulation: it’s a rule that must be followed by those in the business of offering health insurance to their employees. It’s not a compulsion, because businesses don’t have to offer insurance at all; but if they choose to do so, they must follow various regulations.
There is no such choice with the individual mandate, either insurance must be procured, or the tax paid. So you see, Hobby Lobby wasn’t mandated to pay for something in the same sense that individuals are under the ACA.
Ravenman stated earlier that, as an example, if an Amish person claimed a sincerely held religious belief that was not part of the commonly accepted teaching or rules, he’d have a hard time seeing it as “sincerely held”. But not being part of the commonly accepted teaching or rules does not, in point of fact, point to the sincerity of a belief. It points to the popularity of that belief.
There has always been a popular strain of pacifism running through certain segments of christianity. Indeed, in some ways it fairly thrives on being an underdog belief system. But if no one in the RCC ever advocated for pacifism until me in 1942, would my religious beliefs have granted me CO status? I am skeptical.
Back in Vietnam days those applying for CO status did get tested on the sincerity of their beliefs, IIRC. Clearly those in pacifist religions would have an easier time of it than a Catholic, but I can imagine ways in which a Catholic using just war doctrine might be able to get through - though I’ve never heard of any such case.
WW II might be harder.
The entire ACA was not determined to be a tax. The provision that required people to either have health coverage or pay a additional tax was determined to be a tax.
The provision that requires companies to cover contraception was not determined to be a tax.
When a belief is widely held, it’s certainly easier to credibly claim that you also hold that belief.
But I cited several cases where courts rejected self-serving claims of religious belief as insincere, not based on popularity, but on the same bases that other questions of fact are decided: demeanor of the witness, and the knowledge and experience of the fact-finder. A self-serving claim has an appropriately higher burden than one which is not. Consider Hobby Lobby: there are 20 different contraceptives on the HHS schedule. Hobby Lobby objects to only four of them. That’s more credible than objecting to all 20, especially since the four to which they object all have the same effect of preventing a fertilized egg from implanting, and the 16 they are willing to cover provide a contraceptive effect in some other way.
In any event, it’s distressing to me that I can take the time to research four cases from various states and the federal system, and your “rebuttal” is simply an uncited “I am skeptical.” What cases make you skeptical? Where has this process produced the wrong result, according to you?
I pointed to doctrine. Never at any point did I say that religious belief must have more that “x” followers of some element of dogma in order to be valid. What I said was that if one cannot point to a coherent religious doctrine or teaching, it’s hard to imagine that one has a sincerely held religious belief.
In other words, the opposite of religious doctrine is “making things up as one goes along.” The actual important point here is that I’m not aware of what constitutes evidence of a sincerely held secular belief, mostly because secular beliefs tend not to involve ritual and so on. Do you want a mathematician to be judged on whether on not he celebrates pi day?
In any case, what’s the point? Right now, Hobby Lobby is free from the oppression on buying birth control because of their faith in Jesus’ teachings. Would you like McDonalds to be free from buying birth control because of its faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market?
True. This is why religion requires special legal protection. If religion had to compete with reason in a regulated market – if religion had to prove that its products were “safe and effective” the way the pharmaceutical companies have to – it could not exist.
This is also why, at the rock-bottom level, we have to forbid religion from some kinds of exercise. We put people in jail – and rightly – for taking their kids to faith healers rather than to real doctors.
Freedom of belief cannot always be extended into freedom of practice.
(They just won’t let me go out and strangle people in devotion to Kali!)
Religious belief stems from God almighty. Secular belief stems from lowly men, born in sin and wickedness. Pretty straightforward, really. Just don’t ask to see the God –> men connection, it gets a little murky around that step.
marshmallow: it also gets really murky around the “other religions” part. The Christian majority in this country has gone to some very painful lengths to demonize Islam and neo-Paganism (Wicca et al.)
A pro-life atheist business owner who doesn’t want to buy health insurance that includes contraceptives.
Unlike the courts, I don’t claim to read people’s minds. I give people the benefit of the doubt in their religious beliefs. One of your cases relied on demeanor to determine the person’s sincerity. Since you didn’t include the transcript, I have no idea what that entails. Did he turn to the side and mutter “they’re buying, oh my god, I can’t believe they’re buying it”? Or did the judge read a body language book the week before and assume that because he scratched his left eyebrow and then licked his lips he must be lying? Or something inbetween? Another claimed that the professor of the belief only went to church 5 times in a certain period they weren’t serious. Maybe they weren’t. Or maybe they wanted to ease into it. I know I often found church stressful.
But the main reason I am skeptical about the reliability of the test of sincere religious belief is that had I been involved in a court case involving some RCC bit of dogma when I was a freshman in college, I would have very easily passed all of the metrics you laid out in that post and still have been advocating for an insincerely held religious belief.
Constitutional and legal protection for freedom of religion, in the US context, obviously arises out of historical experience; the Enlightenment was in part a reaction to religious repression in Europe, and the ideals of the Enlightenment included the freedom of religion from state control or constraint.
A more modern expression of the same principle probably wouldn’t be limited to freedom of religion. The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, for instance, guarantees “the freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, and states that this includes the freedom to manifest one’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. Simlarly, the European Convention on Human Rights protects “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” in very similar terms.
In short, the US with respect to the legal protection of human rights may, like the British with respect to plumbing, suffer from being an early adapter. Religion needed the protection that the Bill of Rights gave it, but it didn’t exclusively need that protection.
Mind you, the French spotted this at the time. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) provides that “no one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views”.
Others have mentioned Conscientious Objector status and it should be noted that this is an area where non-religious belief has in fact been used to seek exemption to certain laws.
Most famously C.O. status was granted to many military draftees. But not until Welsh v. United States in 1970 did the Supreme Court uphold that C.O. status need not be linked to a religious belief.
More recently C.O. status based upon secular belief has been an issue in immigration matters. Immigrants to the United States are normally required to take an oath per 8 C.F.R. Part 337 (2008). That oath states (in part):
It wasn’t always so broad. Some immigrants objected to taking up arms on pacifist grounds. Some cite a religiously based belief, but some objectors cite a deeply and sincerely held secular belief in pacifism.
Sure. But the statute didn’t rise out of the oceans fully formed. As the title suggests (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) it sought to restore what was previously seen as the prevailing application of the First Amendment. In other words, the statute only deals with religious freedom because the Constitution only deals with religious freedom.
Was this to secure popularity? Well, possibly, yes, partly. One of the other consequences of the US being an early adapter of explicit legal recognition of/protection for human rights is that popular culture in America tends to regard the Bill of Rights not as the last word on the subject, rather than (more accurately) the rather tentative first word. If a thing is mentioned in the Bill of Rights - the right to keep and bear arms, say - it wouldn’t be uncommon in US discourse to find people who take their cue from that, and regard the right as a universal human one, and expect people in other countries to be upset that it doesn’t enjoy similar legal protection there. Conversely if a right isn’t mentioned in the Bill of Rights, there’ll be some degree of scepticism, or at least caution, about accepting it as something with the same moral weight as the rights which are mentioned.
So, yes, a bill to reinforce the protection of freedom of religion is a Good Thing because it’s giving effect to the US Constitution. But a Bill to protect freedom of conscience more generally won’t, in the US, enjoy the same presumption of being a Good Thing.
Well, you aren’t going to get me to say why that atheist should be able to ignore the law, because I think both that person and the religious person should have to buy the same insurance as everyone else.
It’s not a particularly good debate to tell someone, “You know that ruling you disagree with? Why shouldn’t we massively expand it!?!?”
If by “this decision” you mean the Hobby Lobby decision, keep in mind that was NOT a constitutional issue, but one of interpreting a statute passed by Congress. Congress can easily* modify the law to exclude all for-profit institutions.