ObamaCare challenge at Supreme Court
WA SH I NG T ON — Hobby Lobby Inc. is a giant arts and crafts chain store started in Oklahoma City in 1972 by a devout Southern Baptist named David Green. Hardly your basic for-profit business, Green claims his overarching company commitment is “honouring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles.”
Steadfast in the defence of its religious principles, Hobby Lobby will argue Tuesday before the U.S. Supreme Court that the government cannot force it to give its employees health insurance that contradicts its religious beliefs.
Because Hobby Lobby essentially argues that a forprofit corporation has religious rights, the case is probably the most important since Citizens United in 2010, in which the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to give corporations, associations and unions the right to unlimited political financing. At its core, the ruling declared that a corporation is a person.
Now the question is whether a business has religious rights. If so, does it have the right to impose its religious beliefs on the health rights of its employees? In this case, Hobby Lobby refuses to implement certain aspects of the Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare — that requires a company to include all types of contraception in its employee health insurance coverage at no cost.
The Green family, whose company employs about 28,000 people in 602 stores, argues it doesn’t oppose providing 16 of the 20 contraceptives covered by ObamaCare. It won’t, however, supply intrauterine devices (IUDs) and Plan B and Ella, the socalled morning-after pill and the week-after pill. The company claims these devices “end life after conception,” although doctors say they simply prevent conception.
Hobby Lobby is joined in the case by Conestoga Wood Specialties, a kitchen-cabinet manufacturer owned by a family of religious Mennonites based in Pennsylvania.
The lower courts have been split on the contraceptives issue, with three striking down the coverage rule and two upholding it, which is why it has ended up at the Supreme Court.
Central to the case is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which reads: “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.”
Daniel Mack, an assistant director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview that if Hobby Lobby wins, companies could claim religious rights to exempt themselves from a variety of government programs, including minimum wages, civil rights laws and union organizing. A business could claim a religious exemption to supplying any kind of health insurance because its owners are Jehovah’s Witnesses and don’t believe in medical interventions, he said. “Religious freedom is an essential right, but it doesn’t give bosses a free pass to impose their faith on their employees,” he said.
The ACLU has filed a brief supporting the government in this case.
A Washington, D.C. law firm called the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty originally proposed the lawsuit to the owners of Hobby Lobby. Asma Uddin, a Becket Fund lawyer who has helped prepare the Supreme Court case for Hobby Lobby, claimed there are enough safeguards in law to assure that business cannot make bogus religious claims for exemptions.
But she conceded a Supreme Court ruling would certainly strengthen any claim of religious freedoms.