Religious liberties apply to everyone

Published 8:34 pm Monday, December 2, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

  1. Apple’s Tim Cook calls ‘religious objection’ laws dangerous
  2. Protests against religious freedom objection laws moves to Arkansas

Religious liberty is for everyone — in every aspect of their lives. Unfortunately, many on the left and defenders of the Affordable Care Act want to limit religious liberty to only the private aspects of our lives.

That’s not the vision of the Founders, nor a valid interpretation of the First Amendment’s Free Expression clause. Our public lives, including how we conduct our business affairs, must enjoy this freedom also.

What’s brought this up again is the U.S. Supreme Court’s agreement to hear a case brought by Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned company that doesn’t feel it should have to pay for contraceptives and abortion-causing “morning after” pills.

The left is responding with a tired refrain that only people have rights — not corporations.

“To be sure, the devout individual business owners behind the corporations in these challenges have their own personal rights to exercise their religion, but those rights have nothing to do with Obamacare’s contraception coverage requirement,” writes constitutional attorney Elizabeth Wydra for cnn.com. “Why? Because federal law does not require the individuals who own the company to personally provide health care coverage or to satisfy any other legal obligation of the corporation. The law places requirements only on the corporate entity. To conflate the corporations in these cases with their owners violates basic principles of corporate law.”



Does this sound familiar? It’s the left’s argument against the Citizens United decision, which found that everyone has a right to participate in the political process (via donations to preferred candidates). And “everyone” includes employees of corporations.

That’s because corporations are simply organizations made up of people. Wydra is wrong that the “law doesn’t require the individuals who own the company to personally provide heath care coverage” — of course it does. Whether they are acting as sole proprietors or as corporate officers, they’re still acting as persons. They shouldn’t be forced to give up rights simply because they’re wearing business casual rather than Sunday best.

The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro explains that Obamacare exempts some but not all religious organizations.

“The owners of Hobby Lobby donate plenty to charity out of the profits they make, possibly having greater impact than many of the nonprofits that are (or will be) exempt,” he wrote recently. “Even if they didn’t, however, this country was founded on ideals of religious liberty that went on to be enshrined in the First Amendment, so why would we just ignore them?”

Wydra also is mistaken in her reading of judicial and legislative history. First Amendment freedoms have always been interpreted and applied widely, rather than narrowly.

“Americans understand that the essence of religious freedom is that government can’t force people to do things that violate their religious beliefs,” he wrote. “If the HHS rule is repealed, women will still be perfectly free to obtain contraceptives, abortions and whatever else isn’t against the law. They just won’t be able to force others to pay for them.”

Are corporations people? No. But the people who work within them don’t give up their rights at the office door.