Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City-based chain of arts-and-crafts stores, must provide employee health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, a federal judge has ruled, despite the owners’ claim that such drugs violate their religious beliefs.
The ruling states that Hobby Lobby and its sister company, Mardel Inc., which sells Bibles and Christian study books, have no constitutional protection from the broadly construed contraceptive requirements in ObamaCare because “Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not religious organizations.”
This is tantamount to saying that if you’re a Christian, you have no right to run a business based on your religious principles. Even a belief as closely held as opposition to abortion is not enough, the judge said, to supersede the government’s “compelling interest” in providing birth control coverage, including abortifacients.
Hobby Lobby, a family-owned business that grew from a mom-and-pop operation in the 1970s to a chain of 514 stores now employing 13,240 people full-time, is the largest company yet to challenge the health care law. The company’s statement of purpose says the board of directors is committed, first and foremost, to “Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.”
But in its brief to the court, the Obama administration argued that, “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” In the administration’s opinion, the religious beliefs of any company’s owners are irrelevant when weighed against a federal mandate to pay for birth control. The qualms of the religious, in this view, are “too attenuated to qualify as a substantial burden.”
One of the great conceits of ObamaCare is the assumption, implied in its many rules and mandates, that those who oppose the law would eventually cast their convictions aside and just go along with it.
The administration did not foresee—indeed, could not even imagine—that state governors would opt out of the Medicaid expansion or refuse to establish health insurance exchanges, as an increasing number are now doing. There is no provision in the law for such a contingency, and it is not at all clear that ObamaCare will work without the full acquiescence of the states.
Neither did it occur to the law’s authors that millions of uninsured Americans might just choose to pay a penalty rather than comply with the individual mandate, or that some companies would choose to cut employee hours to avoid having to pay for costly, benefit-laden coverage to full-time employees.
But perhaps most shocking was the administration’s hubris in assuming that religious organizations, business owners, and individuals with deeply held beliefs about contraception and abortion would agree to provide coverage for abortion-inducing drugs such as the morning-after pill. Were federal officials surprised when the Catholic Church objected to mandated contraceptive coverage? Did they really think Catholic-owned hospitals and universities would accept such a rule? Did they think conservative Christian schools like Wheaton College—which forbids alcohol, tobacco, and even unsanctioned dancing on its campus—would somehow be willing to provide its employees with morning-after pills and other abortifacients?
The only explanation for these gross miscalculations is that the liberals and progressives who crafted the health care law do not take seriously the convictions of Americans who oppose abortion and contraception on religious or moral grounds. To them, such convictions are repugnant, backward, and intolerable—and those who hold them should keep quiet about it.
In the government’s brief for the Hobby Lobby case, we see a wholesale dismissal of the moral convictions of the company’s owners that borders on contempt. But there is something even more insidious in the argument: the assertion that “for-profit” businesses are inherently secular, that corporations have no rights to freedom of speech or religion, and that even if they did, they are nothing compared to the government’s “compelling interest” in health care reform.
This amounts not only to a kind of secular diktat in the public square, but also to a refutation of numerous Supreme Court decisions that affirm First Amendment rights for private citizens and also for voluntary associations, including corporations.
But it is not at all clear the administration will succeed. Last month, a nearly identical federal suit went in favor of a Christian publishing company, which won a preliminary injuction exempting it from the contraception mandate, as did a separate suit filed by a Catholic business owner. Dozens of other lawsuits are on the way. As administration officials push ahead with the implementation of ObamaCare, they should know that this fight will likely go to the Supreme Court, and they should remember that companies are run by real people with real beliefs, who will not lightly cast their religious convictions aside—no matter what the government orders them to do.
John Daniel Davidson is a policy analyst for the Center for Health Care Policy with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas. He may be reached at jdavidson@texaspolicy.com.
RESOURCES
Judge: Hobby Lobby Must Offer Morning-After Pill
More GOP governors decline to create health insurance exchanges
Health-Care Law Spurs a Shift to Part-Time Workers
Judge grants company injunction against health-care law contraception efforts
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Comments:
If it does not, the next question is whether businesses and churches will roll over or fight for liberty. I pray we have the integrity to do so, and conduct a campaign of civil disobedience that'd remind people of the Civil Rights movement. I'm afraid that too many might not have such integrity.
And that would lead to question #3...what will the next assault on liberty and prosperity resemble, and how long will it be before we effectively have lost our long-held American freedoms.
Yes and yes, because currently most catholic health care places merely give lip service to the Ethical and religious directives. Young women patients bring money to health care systems, and so you have to give out the candy to attract these patients to keep the doors open. Or you'd have to fire a lot of administrators. Sister Sheehan just wrote a column saying how everything is going well with Obamacare. She was one of the execs whispering in Obama's ear about this stuff. She knows there are relatively few catholic doctors willing to abide by the ERD's, and admin handles the money, while Lazarus sits in the womb.
The rule is being accepted, the lawsuits represent relatively few Christian organizations. If every catholic healthcare organization fussed and sued, the mandate would die. What percentage are fussing? 1%?
How can you possibly consider declining to provide contraception and abortion to your employees to be a form a coercion? Clearly the only coercion occurring is the coercion of employers by the Obama administration to put aside their religion.
So while I am passionately pro-life within my general social conservatism, I find that the majority of those in the pro-life movement -- most especially bishops -- are woefully ignorant of the painful realities involved. I do not have statistics, but I have a strong suspicion that a significant percentage of prescriptions for "abortion-inducing drugs" are for cases like our own. At the very least, it is more than is presumed by those so adamantly against funding them (and quite possibly in favor of banning them).
The administration is imposing their baseless hippy 60’s dogmas on everyone, that the morning after pill is a necessary good or “health care”. ObamaCare is an instrument to impose these dogmas. They high jacked healthcare. It's critical that this issue reaches the Supreme Court ASAP.
JA, abortifacients are being forced on everyone as a back up contraceptive, don’t mix issues.
Henry, just because Norquist (someone subsidized by the Middle East), says something, it does not mean it is true. Five years ago the largely Republican Governors Association did a study and came to the conclusion the Medicaid was significantly more efficient than private insurances, and cost less.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID7o5L3CaRU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq-ZGktYWWA
Your objections to the stance of the bishops is specious. In 2007 I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis and prescribed a drug for treatment of it that has the side effect of being an abortifacient. Since I was working for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, they initially refused to provide assistance for the purchase of that drug, on the grounds it was an abortifacient.
But there was a process whereby I could verify that I was a male, and also not using it with the intention of getting an abortion, and after that process it fell under the normal prescription co-pays of the Archdiocesan healthcare. In short, to say bishops are denying the use of drugs because they can cause an abortion, in instances when they are not being used in that way (as you suggest), is simple nonsense. It is also potentially quite disingenuous.
I don’t begrudge anyone their religious views. I don’t begrudge Catholics saying that they object to paying money that will be used to finance contraceptives. And I don’t begrudge libertarians saying that they object to government, period. Indeed, if I ever encountered a person that had NO qualms about government, I’d suspect I’d encountered someone who wasn’t paying attention.
As far as I can tell, ObamaCare does not compel any private party to do anything other than pay money to government. Yes, a private party has the option to buy certain types of insurance in lieu of paying money, but that’s an OPTION, not an obligation.
I find this current furor over birth control easy to understand from a partisan perspective, but hard to understand from a liberty perspective. I understand the Catholic Church, and others, may have doctrinal objections to a variety of things – birth control, capital punishment, war, etc. And I understand that the money I pay to government finances all of these things. Thus, I have difficulty taking Catholics seriously when they argue passionately about the harm of paying for birth control, yet placidly pay their taxes financing war and capital punishment.
Hard-core libertarians argue that no one should have to pay anything to government if he doesn’t feel like it. Wise or not, that’s a consistent view. A contrary, and consistent, view is to conclude that we make many decisions collectively, and the duty to pay for the collective does not depend upon your approval of every aspect of the collective. But people advocating some middle ground – objecting to paying for this one aspect of public policy, but not all the other (more egregious) ones — leave me puzzled.
For what it’s worth, the Framers did not discussion conscientious objection much when working on the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Anti-Establishment clauses. But they did when discussing the Second Amendment – you know, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Oddly, the Framers seemed to imagine that this amendment pertained to well-regulated militias. Consequently they discussed at length whether to adopt the policies found in other states’ constitutions pertaining to conscientious objectors to war. Specifically, these provisions declared that contentious objectors could not be drafted into the military – provided that the objectors recruited a replacement, or paid money sufficient to hire a replacement. While contentious objectors could be freed from providing personal services that offended them, there was never any idea that they could be freed from PAYING for policies that offended them.
(Ultimately the Framers couldn’t agree whether contentious objector status should be a matter of individual right or executive discretion, so the subject was eventually excluded from the amendment.)
Of course, others HAVE objected to contributing to paying money to a government that does things they find offensive: famously, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes due to his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. And he went to jail until the taxes were paid. For better or worse, not even the Obama Administration can deprive contentious objectors of this option.
However, Medicaid has not been proven to be more efficient than private insurance companies.
The problem with most comparisons is that it includes the cost of marketing and selling insurance as well as the costs of collecting premiums on the private side, but ignores the cost of collecting taxes on the public side. It also ignores the substantial administrative cost that Medicare and Medicaid shift to the providers of care.
Studies have shown that when all costs are included, Medicare costs more, not less, to administer. Further, raw numbers show that, using Medicare/Medicaid’s own accounting, its administrative expenses per enrollee are higher than private insurance. They are lower only when expressed as a percentage – but that may be because the average medical expense for a senior is so much higher than the expense for non-seniors. They also don't include fraud losses of $1 out of every $10 dollars of benefits paid. Private insurers devote more resources to fraud prevention and find it profitable to do so.
They are absolutely convinced of that. So much so that they also oppose laws requiring parental notification and consent before your minor daughter can get an abortion. They know better than you do regarding what is best for your child, which is always, of course, to get an abortion. It is no problem to them if you consider that to be the exploitation of your frightened, desperate child and the murder of your grandchild. Your convictions are so "repugnant, backward, and intolerable” and your opinions are therefore so absolutely worthless, that total strangers know what is best for your family in matters of life and death. If the abortion is botched and your daughter loses her life too, which happens occasionally, only then do you get to find out about the concern of these total strangers for your child and grandchild that is so vastly superior to your own. If you then object to what has happened that is proof to them of your intolerance and insensitivity towards others, so just shut up.