Corporations Are People, the Biblical Sequel
Corporations Are People, the Biblical Sequel
The Supreme Court will decide whether companies don’t have to cover contraception because they have religious beliefs.
By Dahlia Lithwick
On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear a pair of religious freedom cases: Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius. The question is whether for-profit corporations may deny contraceptive coverage to their employees—coverage that the Affordable Care Act requires—based on their owners’ religious objections. As court-watchers have been predicting for months, the case will prove to be an unholy alliance of corporate personhood doctrine, religious freedom claims, and abortion rights. What, I ask, could possibly go wrong?
The court agreed to hear an appeal from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based chain of craft stores owned by a Christian family who claimed that the birth-control mandate violated their company’s religious freedom. The court also agreed to hear an appeal from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which went the opposite way, finding that Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a cabinet manufacturer, did not have the same religious conscience rights as an individual. The split between these two circuit courts and other appeals courts, plus almost 50 other cases in the pipeline, meant that the Supreme Court was almost forced to weigh in.
The case raises critically important questions under both the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment and a 1993 law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. RFRA was passed, as David Savage explains here, in response to a 1990 Supreme Court decision holding that neutral, generally applicable laws, if they only incidentally burden religious practice, may stand if the government has a rational basis for passing them (the lowest bar for courts to impose). RFRA effectively reinstated strict scrutiny—a higher standard for the government to meet—for laws that substantially burden religious exercise.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/11/supreme_court_and_obamacare_contraception_mandate_are_companies_persons.html